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All of Your Edges. From my portfolio with Vogue Italia on PhotoVogue.

Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. ~Albert Camus

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934 Photo by @vargaphoto Edit by me.

“Things That Hold Us Back”. Self portrait. As we mature and are heated by the natural forces of existence, we tend to lose contact with our own life force. The older we get and the more "adulterated" we become, the less psychic energy we have available. By middle age, many people feel they have lost a precious part of themselves and are leading inauthentic and unproductive lives. Our souls have despaired trying to survive in a world of spiritual drought. The basic problem is that we identify with our superficial personalities, not our true essences, and we invest all our energy in our egos, which are artificial constructs. In other words, we spend our life force trying to animate Frankenstein monsters that were never meant to live. That is why life for most human beings is one assault on their ego after another, and the more we try to enhance or enshrine our egos, the more insult we suffer. Decline of self-esteem, embarrassment, failure to be loved, loss of material possessions, and all the other harsh realities of life, gradually crucify our pampered egos. Yet all those bad, uncomfortable things just might be good for us if they burn away ego and slap us back to the reality of Self. In many ways, the fires of hell are beneficial because they expose deeper layers of our essence while rubbing away the false person. In the words of poet T.S Eliot: We are "redeemed from the fire by fire." -- Dennis William Hauck

The Things That We Do.

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