My rebirth

I started seeing a therapist. I have made a habit of practicing yoga everyday. I have made conscious efforts to clean up my eating habits. I sit still. I read a little bit more each day. I am kinder and more understanding to my children and my man. I am kinder to myself. I respect myself and love myself. Hitting rock bottom over two years ago, having suicidal thoughts and constantly doubting myself MADE me start doing all those things. It took time and it was anything but easy. But it brought out the best and most strongest in me. As a stay-at-home mum of three young children, I still lose my shit on a frequent basis but I no longer beat myself up about it. Instead I call it my rebirth, an evolving that doesn’t happen just once. It happens over and over again. Just like waves keep rolling up and then away, just like our breathe holds and releases, I am born and reborn constantly. One of those moments in my life was captured so beautifully by the talented Anca Clivet.

Anna contacted me on a hot summer evening. She asked me if I would be interested in a photo session with her. She asked if I would like to have a family one or by myself. I knew straight away that I wanted this to be about me. Did I feel bad for wanting this to be about me and just me? Fuck yes! But what I know now and what I have learned over the past couple of years, takes away that guilt. I have every right to grab a free photo session with an amazing photographer and pose my heart out. I wrote back saying that it will be just me. I am growing, I said to her, I want to remember what I looked like when I was doing that.

That’s the other thing, I feel more confident and more at peace with my body than ever before. In fact I think I look fucking great! Over the past ten years, my body has carried and birthed three babies, gained unimaginable and uncomfortable weight, and has had to deal with my constant disapproval and hating. It was a road I had to go down in order to get where I am today. This is the result. In the photos below I am wearing my mother’s beautiful emerald dress she wore the night she got engaged to my dad.

And in the photos that follow, I am wearing my grandmother’s dress. Over 60 years old, I chose it for the photo shoot because this is where I came from. A collectiveness of experiences and a rebirth of itself.

Here is something Anca wrote about our photo session: I found out that if I want to grow, I need to go back to my genesis. Right there is that fundamental essence of the future blossoming. Right there is the seed that lives only to accept its own transformation. For the series with Eleni’s personal process of rebirth meant acknowledging all of her, what legacies she has received, her past symbolised by her grandmother’s dress, celebrating what she is in the present with the book and looking faithfully into the future, looking bravely at the light that will show her the way.