35 Times I Cried Over a Love That Wasn't Mine

This work emerged from a year marked by personal upheaval — a period of physical illness, relationship trauma, and relentless ambition that left me questioning whether the life I was building was truly my own. The existential crisis that followed was jarring, dissociative, and scary. I spent a large part of the year crying — over relationships that could never be, over past lives, over success, over loneliness, over family, over death. When I felt hollow and the pain was more real than my own body, I would take a photo as an act of self-documentation, of self-preservation. This piece is composed of these photos taken during breakdowns over the past year. The linearity of time is preserved as each transient portrait is rendered chronologically in the order it was taken. Yet together, they are not discrete memories — they run, they bleed, and they make up a life. I want the audience to sit in a feeling, not in a setting. An emotional state needs no justification. In some ways, this is a work of acceptance.