What I Learned in the Light
2022
“what it is for us to be alive,
to love life so much we choose this brokenness
just to have the smallest taste of it.”
-Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, I’m Alive. It Hurts. I love It.
What I Learned in the Light is a body of work that serves as an intimate look into my life as a young trans woman in recovery. I use visual and poetic language in my daily coping to convey the subject matter of light with the way it pulls my emotional mind to the past and present. The landscape of my narrative, like the light I photographed and the poems I write, sit somewhere in between living and dying as well as joy and heartbreak.
The light is a natural manifestation of a spiritual connection for me. In it, I find echoes of people and scenes from my past that I continue to hold dear. These vestiges call me to be reflective and mindful as I draw upon their strength in the light’s inherent beauty. I wrote the book’s ten poems as a reflection of the grief and bliss I find in light. It was important to me that I wrote of the breadth of this experience.
