It's a classic case of "I don't know where it went"....

On Tuesday I'm participating in Pechakucha and presenting about food/my relationship with food/poverty/decolonization etc all under ten minutes. It's really important for me that when I do picture-based presentations (or any presentation) that I use my own pictures rather than take things off the internet. So I literally just spent the last hour going through my boxes of photos from high school, from uni, from japan, from terrace, from PG searching for gems or at least pictures of Terrace. I have a tonne of pictures from my flickr and have scanned a number of old favourites and uploaded them but stumbled across this beauty.

I've spent the past year and a half tearing my life apart and myself down to get to the root of why I've been so sick (mentally and physically). I'm starting to feel better and "find happiness" (aka white bullshit) etc., but seeing this picture..it kind of just hit me. This is the last time I honestly remember being happy. This was March 2003. So much of my life then mimics my life today. I know where things went sour and how I just let that manifest inside me for a decade. It's gross and sad and relieving all in the same thought. Most of it is tied to stress and anxiety and depression and bad health/eating disorder. I made bad choices that enabled that behaviour in myself and held on to traumatic shit for way too long. Blah.

ETA: I'm happy now! The past 10 years have been interesting that's for sure.