Stories of Illness Final Project: 'Ibrahim (+ How I learnt to start loving myself)
My initial idea for a final project was to focus on diseases specifically the loss of ease in a person life when they suffer from a disease. I called it 'dis-ease'. The idea was to focus on different aspects of diseases, visible and invisible, and to have a "Drawing Together' style group healing experience. However I quickly realized that I did not have to time to facilitate such an event given my sporadic schedule because of finals.
Feeling defeated during Thanksgiving break I started to think about using myself as the main subject of this "Dis-ease' project, how would I view my disease and what images could I create that speak for my experience. During this process I had an epiphany. All this time in class I've been focusing on my own Visible disease (atopic dermatitis /Eczema), never tackling the real disease faced my invisible disease; body dysmorphia. During my self-reflection I remembered that in my first time participating in class I blurted out that my mind and body do not recognize each other. I had been wanting to highlight this aspect of myself from the very beginning but always felt apprehension. But over the course of my time in class, being able to be open and vulnerable with everyone and they too in turn feeling comfortable to do the same really have given me the confidence I needed to finally address my dysphoria in a way where I can acknowledge it and in doing so myself.
With all that preamble out of the way, I made a image board of events that led to my dysmorphia manifesting. There are three different 'narratives' that each contributed to my dysmorphia, the 'Medical Narrative', an 'Observed Narrative' and finally my own 'Experienced Narrative'.
The 'narratives' are on sticky notes which are pealed off to show the stories within. Each 'narrative' is color-coded, medical is green, observed is red and experienced is blue. There are threads/wires that connect each narrative to my dysmorphic persona 'The Squiggle'. While finalizing the board I added myself as I AM in cartoon form(a feat I couldn't do since the beginning of class) on-top of my persona to represent my growth with this disease. I have also made a slide deck that has more detail images if you wish to view them,