“You Wouldn’t Be So Depressed If You Really Believed in God” is a photographic response to my lifelong battle with depression. Through abstracted self-portraiture, I explore how this invisible illness affects my children, my creative practice, and my relationship with daily life. I look at how my faith (or lack thereof), Latine cultural assumptions, and role as mother shape how I understand and relate to depression. I do not attempt to create self-portraits in the traditional sense, but instead I show the fragmented and sometimes distorted ways in which I experience the mundane rituals of everyday life. How depression can distort your world in a myriad of ways, innocent moments can feel threatening, joy and beauty can fill you with great sadness because you can’t help but start to mourn the loss that the future will inevitably bring.

My mother would often say to me: “You wouldn’t be so depressed if you really believed in God.”. As a child, this advice made me feel like I was not only failing God and my family, but that I was completely powerless. Years later, I came across Jane Kenyon’s poem “Having it out with Melancholy”, and discovered that the same phrase my mother often said to me. It filled me with great emotion to read that the “advice” that had haunted me since childhood had also factored into Kenyon’s life.

“When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.

......

3. Suggestion From a Friend

You wouldn’t be so depressed
If you really believed in God.”

- Jane Kenyon

“You Wouldn’t Be So Depressed If You Really Believed in God” is a photographic response to my lifelong battle with depression. Through abstracted self-portraiture, I explore how this invisible illness affects my children, my creative practice, and my relationship with daily life. I look at how my faith (or lack thereof), Latine cultural assumptions, and role as mother shape how I understand and relate to depression. I do not attempt to create self-portraits in the traditional sense, but instead I show the fragmented and sometimes distorted ways in which I experience the mundane rituals of everyday life. How depression can distort your world in a myriad of ways, innocent moments can feel threatening, joy and beauty can fill you with great sadness because you can’t help but start to mourn the loss that the future will inevitably bring.

My mother would often say to me: “You wouldn’t be so depressed if you really believed in God.”. As a child, this advice made me feel like I was not only failing God and my family, but that I was completely powerless. Years later, I came across Jane Kenyon’s poem “Having it out with Melancholy”, and discovered that the same phrase my mother often said to me. It filled me with great emotion to read that the “advice” that had haunted me since childhood had also factored into Kenyon’s life.

“When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.

......

3. Suggestion From a Friend

You wouldn’t be so depressed
If you really believed in God.”

- Jane Kenyon