I had so many adults around me reminding me that I was a kid. I also had a lot of adults saying things to me like, "When I was your age..." and sort of idealizing it. I didn't like that they idealized it.
You just have to take a little salt, and since I'm doing that it's, like, BOOM! In one week, I felt it kick in. All the commotion around me, all the water around me, moving left and right around me, became like a lake.
She was really strong around me. Having me at 16 had to have been a big responsibility. My mom gave up everything for me, had three jobs, supported me, sacrificed her life for me.
I've had more misrepresentations than I can handle, and people have told the wickedest lies about me. A lot of them have taken their frustrations out on me, and I don't like that because it can wound. Not necessarily me, but those around me. Journalists can be so bad.
I definitely had one guy come up to me and ask if I knew where to get DMT. He had a crewcut and he didn't look like he'd ever done a drug in his life. He didn't seem curious he seemed like he wanted to get me to do something. Like "You're the laziest narc ever dude. This is ridiculous. What, do you think I bring drugs around with me? Are you retarded? Why don't you go find gangsters?"
I knew that I had it tough compared to children around me. But I felt like I needed it. I think I had the wisdom as a child to know that it would help me later on.
I could feel the warmth of his presence as if a soft blanket had been wrapped around my soul, around my heart. It held me and protected me. It sheltered me and I knew I wasn't alone anymore.
My faith in God is everything at this point. Also, my family and friends that I've had around me pretty much my whole life and my boyfriend, we've been together for eight years. I try to keep people around me who've been around me, who've seen me struggle. They know how dedicated I am and how hard I've worked. They know me - not the Jennifer from American Idol and Dreamgirls, but the real Jennifer.
What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.
I definitely felt growing up that I wasn't seen as the same as anyone around me because no one around me looked like me. There were no black Scottish role models.
A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
I want a relationship like the one my mom and dad had, what every strong relationship around me looks like, and I wasn't going to allow past heartbreak to hinder me from finding that.
Some of my colleagues are surprised by how little personal interaction I've had with "my" authors, but I don't translate to go fishing for friends. Part of me suspects that they wouldn't like me, or that I wouldn't like them, which would inevitably get in the way of the mission. None of the theory built around translation matters to me anyway: much of the process, I find, is intuitive.
It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen --4000 dead and starving lying around-- and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and I had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp --it didn't mean a thing.
When I got the red card all the Chelsea players come around. It felt like I had a lot of babies around me.
When my father finally got around to teaching me to drive, he was impressed at my "natural" talent for driving, not knowing that I had already been secretly driving my mother's car around the neighborhood. When I took the test and got my license and my father gave me my own set of keys to the car one night at dinner, it was a major rite of passage for him and my mother. Their perception of me had changed and was formally acknowledged. For me the occasion meant a private sanction to do in public what I had already been doing in secret.