Matter Of Time

“‘It’s a matter of time’, you said,
‘It’s a matter of time’.
‘Figure out what is yours’, I said,
‘Figure out what is mine’.
And even if I pretended trust,
It was not hard to pretend.
And even if I gave up myself,
You’re not on what I depend.

As you wanted me to be right,
I preferred to be wrong.
And as your self-pity got control,
You supposed to get strong.
You might misunderstand me, dear,
But I had all that before.
Get control of yourself, my friend,
But you’re about to ignore.

Don’t have to comprehend where I belong,
Where I pretend to know if you’re wrong.
You tried to reach me on behalf of your errors,
A life getting serious.
You’re not as delirious to look in the mirrors
Of open decisions, so run.
Behalf of your errors, a life getting serious,
So look for where you have begun.”

[ Matter Of Time – Leandra ]

Oh boy, this photo.

So, remember how in 2015 I was going through an utterly disastrous moment, I had to really, truly acknowledge that I was clinically depressed because, left untreated, it was pulling me down, I had dropped out of university for good, I had no idea whatsoever where my life was headed and, on top of it all, that included photography because I had had a certain experience that had totally shattered my self-confidence? Yeah, I don’t have fond memories of that time.

At some point, after I reached my absolute low due to a wrong anti-depressant prescription that turned me into a zombie for about a month and a half (don’t worry, I’ve changed my therapist immediately afterwards), things started to get to a point where at least I was functional enough to tell myself, “Boy, try to figure your shit out; to hell with past mistakes and future anxieties, just focus on the here an now, to find a way to feel better, get stronger and then deal with the rest”.

While most of my life was still up in the air, at least I got my creativity back, my most important way to sort out my feelings, deal with them and feel like I could turn something productive out of my misery. I reshot the photos that had opened that can of worms in the first place, and went on to take a few others for my Inspiration Hurts and Morphine projects because I was approaching a once-in-a-lifetime deadline: I was going to have my hair cut short.

I was tired of wearing it long and it was one of the weights I felt I needed to shed if I wanted to go on. I was struggling with my image, with the amount of care it required (and when you’re that depressed, even basic self-care is difficult) and I just kept it tied all the time because it was an annoyance. I considered the idea for months, then, when I was feeling like I was at a turning point, I decided to do it. It was, as they say, a matter of time.

You see what I did there.

I had the idea the morning I was set to have the haircut and decided to go for it: I envisioned the song as a conversation between zombie-me and enough-is-enough-me, and thought of rendering it with old, long-haired me sitting on the floor on his self-pity party in the shadow, and new, short-haired me standing up confident and facing the light: the change, symbolised by the haircut, was the titular matter of time. So I set the tripod, took the long-haired photos and left it all there for the next morning, with the same light, angle, perspective and everything, for the short-haired one. I also carefully studied the styling so I’d wear two similar outfits but with slight differences, to signal a progression in the narrative. Basically, everything worked in theory.

The problem is, I was in a hurry and the first batch of portraits was so-and-so: the best one fit the idea perfectly, but I miscalculated the frame and had part of my arm cut off. When I tried to assemble the photo, this made the whole composition horribly unbalanced and, hey, the problem was the portrait I couldn’t get another shot at, so what to do? I just left the PSD sitting unfinished on my external hard-drive, and tried (and failed) to come up with an entirely different concept for the song.

Then yesterday, while I was doing some cleaning up, I opened it again and damn, I still liked the idea after all this time. So I went through the other takes and ta-dah, I found one that wasn’t as good, but whose elbow I could transplant to move the whole composition so it wouldn’t look awkward. At this point, I only had to wait for morning today, re-shoot the background (which, at this point, had become a bloody mess), blend the whole damn thing together and hell yes, I did it, I saved the photo!

It has become a matter of a long time at this point, but I’m glad I pulled it off after all, it’s a good reminder that even when you lose all hope, you can still dig you way out of a bad moment and do something out of it.