Between Seeing & Being Seen

This work began when I was feeling like a scared kid again, except I was a scared legal adult with a mortgage.

At the time, I was living with two rescued cats. One was afraid of almost everything, yet curiosity inevitably brought him out of hiding. I recognized the behavior.

Insecurity has a way of making the world smaller. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we learn to question ourselves, anticipate rejection, and avoid situations that might expose our inadequacies. Eventually, those learned insecurities begin to feel like personality traits.

For years, I had been living what Carl Jung called a “provisional life,” waiting for some future version of myself who would finally be ready to participate.

I began photographing myself wearing a prosthetic cat nose, making my insecurity embarrassingly literal. What started as an attempt to understand it became something less predictable.

I’m still insecure. This time, curiosity won the argument.