A period of personal growth is a profound time that a person goes through. Change is viral, attempting to alter a certain aspect in me suddenly causes a need of an antidote to exit this state of never ending self alteration.
The Coronavirus pandemic has made me come to the realization of how precarious life is, most importantly, it made me realize how imperfect I am. Despite embracing my imperfections and perfecting ‘self love’ I realized that some imperfections ought to change. Once you realize how your mental imperfections deteriorate yourself and stab the people you feel for, it shows you what really is important in this life, how short life is and how easily something dissipates from your existence.
At the beginning of the lockdown situation, I really didn’t have the time to think of who I was as a person, to be fair I never did, I usually spent my time studying or hanging out with friends, which didn’t really give me the opportunity to focus on ‘self growth’, but as lockdown merged with my summer vacation, my brain decided to move its thinking gears to show me who I am as a person. In this perfectly imperfect life, we tend to grasp the ideology of backing up our actions, which collides with the principle of a humans innate mindset of pure narcissism, hence it’s difficult to change certain qualities. Certain traits are best left abandoned, I began with shedding my perfectionist mentality, the idea that my earthly life is ideal, with quintessential beings around me, just perfect adolescents in high school having the time of their lives, yet that was never the case. Perceiving the idea of how flawed we are as beings is melancholy, and registering the reality of my ‘perfect’ situation drops my gut every time. Ive always detested the thought of imperfection, thus I surrounded myself with people who supported my mentality, we all suffered eventually. Grasping how agonized the people I surrounded myself with, during this never-ending period of lockdown, revealed my true imperfections, it showed me how they spread virally in my head, how contagious they were to the people around me and how easily it transmitted around my thoughts and pulled me down. I swiftly formed magic with this mindset, though this period really did teach me that magic was simply a synonym of tragic. I edified myself through comprehending my flaws as a person, and to find shelter in an alternative headspace to sustain mental comfort and warmth in this unsound actuality. A flawed reality is the purest form of actuality, which is why I always craved the desirable sensation of euphoria, ecstatic feelings of denying the crystal vision of how we hurt, and the deafening style used to express our pain; silence.
Coming to this realization of personal toxic behavior might be pretty common, however facing it tends to be extremely rare, while discovering a comfortable way to cope with it is scarce. I’d like to think that I’ve mastered coping with these imperfections by capturing my alternative reality and freezing them on polaroids. Photographing the good times with my people, to eventually look through them and rewatch those frozen time pieces, hear the laughs, the cheers, the cries, and remembering the sensation of adrenaline and the warmth of love we had for one another. Replaying those memorable cherished scenes aids me to recall the good times, that despite all the draining days, the good ones will come again, no matter how I feel, no matter how imperfect my thoughts are. The art of photography as a whole has assisted this short and draining journey, capturing different scenes of cloudy skies, or fairytale castles during vacations in different countries has always showed me that with imperfection, aspiration arrives.
Raian Alawieh
International school of Choueifat Al ain