Pallavi Sharda Instagram – 2022 OUTTAKE I came across this image today from a shoot done mid year. I stopped to look at her, at the girl staring at me. I thought about the way that she was discarded as ‘not good enough’ for whatever purpose she was shot. I considered the year from the point of view of that which ‘didn’t make the cut’. That which was rejected, either through my own eyes or that of another. And yet the year was ‘normal’: organs pulsed, work continued, the gaze poured in, both the delicious and the dickhead dictums of the past visited in turns. Love was shared and loneliness felt. Today I consider the seconds I spent within it saying that something was not enough; the seconds not spent basking in the knowingness that everything was, is. Those seconds are gone, fleeting like all else. The impressions remain. I realised why this had, in a split second, become a discarded photo by my own consciousness. Because I was scared. I was scared of what my eyes said as they stared into the lens. Scared of their defiance. Of the strength they exuded. Because this was what was once taught to me, that my defiance was a stubbornness that made me hard – hard work. That I needed to remain soft, malleable. The moment I looked at it I would have become acutely aware of the stories my eyes were daring to tell. ‘Not yet’, my conscious mind shssshd it. But we know well by now that suppressing story is one of the key creators of illness. And so, in one of the least original things to have been uttered on this platform, bareness is where I want to sit in 2023. In pure bareness. So that the only gazes which I dare not reveal are the ones that lie. 📸 image which I love by @justin_griffiths