Agathokakological

My aspirations of true to life documentary photography were surrendered years ago when I was diagnosed with narcolepsy. These images serve as an allegory for a life caught in the in-between.

My aspirations of true to life documentary photography were surrendered years ago when I was diagnosed with narcolepsy. These images serve as an allegory for a life caught in the in-between. Agathokakological is an archaic adjective describing something to be composed of both good and evil, two concepts themselves that have become muddied in definition the longer I live. With narcolepsy you can wake up in the most bizarre and startling situations, times of day, or company. Often provoking an uneasiness, and possibly an out of body experience in which you cannot distinguish if you are in fact in waking or dream life. And then there is cataplexy, a pronounced symptom of my condition which insidiously attacks your body's ability to experience strong emotions, and quite literally will make you collapse when you laugh, it replicates many of the same characteristics of seizures. This disease took years for me to master in my anticipation, and has resulted in broken cameras, ruined relationships, and many many many close calls with death.

Given the nature of all this, it has led me towards a constant pursuit of agency, often times through means probably ill-advised. Risky behavior and adrenaline inducing activities, drug use, etc. It has also led me to deep dive into the occult and a fear of curses and hexes, particularly one of which I believe was cast upon me somewhere between Saratoga, NY and Burlington, VT from what I decided was something breathing behind a curtain in an image of a window in a condemned motel i put in this selection.. It gave birth to a rocky relationship with reality; ghosts and visions too real to scoff off as hallucinatory or the product of just dreams/nightmares or late nights. This project is my attempt at definitively illustrating the feeling of not only being narcoleptic but the consequential journey one may find themselves on trying to make sense of such a confusing and helpless feeling condition.