Just as long as I think I exist

I wake up encapsulated by darkness; the sea has pulled me in so deep that life on the surface feels like a dream. I’m completely alone; everyone I hold love for, whose presence I touched, all my life’s passersby seem unreal to me now. As if I were never there, as if I were a consciousness only, hovering above, loving them desperately while they couldn't see me. I keep pushing and struggling to pry open the door and break back into the realm of the living, just as long as I still think I exist. Just to see myself in the eyes of another, to be sure that I am made of flesh. My intangible hand reaches out from beyond for someone to hold me, to pull me back into reality; please speak slowly and guide me through it – I’ve lost all sense of its rules.

To be held, childlike, defenseless. To lose your protective skin – not by choice, but by dissolution. To be reduced to a breathing body, an open wound, a dysfunctional mind. To realise that you need to be tended or you’ll disappear, you’ve made a full circle. An outlier of normalcy, a disabled woman. I’m allowing myself to be held, for the first time.

The project “Just as long as I think I exist” touches upon the experience of mental disability that forced me out of the country of residence and into a village in the South of Poland where I could be supported by my mother and sister. When, as an adult, I could no longer function on my own, they allowed me space to fall apart; I finally learned to receive and allowed myself to be carried. I came to realize that healing is hardly an individual journey; it slowly emerges, instead, within an interwoven fabric of encounters, in a network of mutual holding.

Daria Izworska was selected from among the applicants for “Sisterhood in Practice” exhibition. This Artist Feature is part of Der Greif’s initiative to bring female-identifying and non-binary voices to the forefront.