Photography has become my way holding on to things that are disappearing. When I was eleven years old, I started having panic attacks at the thought of dying. About once a week for the better part of a decade, I would spiral into a crying, shaking, dysfunctional mess.
 
Slowly, I learned to recognize the thought patterns that fed my anxiety, and I worked hard to let them go before they became too loud to ignore. In 2022 a psychologist introduced me to the idea of complicated grief, and a better understanding of so many past events clicked into place for me. Armed with this knowledge, I started finding new connections between many of the photographs in my personal archive: moments when I intuitively recognized this sense of grief, even if I hadn’t learned the words to name it yet. These moments jumped out at me as I leafed through old contact sheets, booted up old hard drives, and scrolled through pictures from my phone’s camera roll. As I began to put these images together, I also created new photographs to accompany them. With bated breath is in some ways a series cobbled together from photographic odds and ends I couldn’t see clearly until now, but in other ways it’s a series I’ve been working on since I was eleven.