I’m living in my first home away from my family, a house built in the 1920s. There’s chipping paint on the porch. A floorboard that creaks near the bookshelf. Walls spotted with holes from art once hung. It is marked with textures and blemishes, as are all things gifted with time. But I don’t hate these details. They make up a house that keeps in warmth, that protects from rain and ice, with rooms for privacy, for cooking, for lounging, for meal sharing, for art making, with doors I lock when I’m nervous and open when I welcome people in. I love this home for all the ways it serves me, comforts me, and brings me joy. Can I not love my original and permanent home, my body, for these same reasons? For the blood that it pumps, for its senses and all of the pleasure they bring, for the arms that hug so tightly, for the stomach cushioning that protects my organs, for the marks that are reminders of meals I’ve never had to miss?
 

Sometimes we forget to see ourselves gently. In all of our detail, our textures, our shapes, our softness, our veins, our dirt, our ripping and unshaven skin. These pieces of me have always evaded the lens. A force of habit, a reflex so ingrained that it has to be forced out of hiding and interrogated into confession. This part of me thinks these human intricacies should forever be kept unseeable and untouchable--that, if anyone else were to see them, or to touch them, they would coil away.
 

Through the lens, I try to see myself not as a body riddled with ugliness, but as a body that exists for me as it is meant to, one detailed with with my own idiosyncratic and unrepulsive marks of nature and time, captured to be seen, and so tactile that they ask to be touched. As I make these images, as I notice and capture the details of this body in these spaces, how I view myself is made briefly obsolete by the material reality of what I see before me--something neither unfavorable or favorable, but something that simply just is. My home within my home.