RUMINATION /ˌruːmɪˈneɪʃn/
the process of repetitively dwelling on negative thoughts, past mistakes, or distressing emotions without finding a resolution. It acts like an endless mental loop—frequently asking “why did this happen?” or “what if?”—and is closely linked to worsening anxiety and depression.
It’s often a feeling I get almost all the time, not because I always think I’m the problem, but instead I just replay everything that has happened to me that day to process feelings, thoughts, or even lessons.
I tried to depict that part of my everyday in a visual way, which is heavily inspired by the new Backrooms movie and is what I felt I wanted to make my next photo series about after watching it.
To avoid spoiling the movie, I was drawn to very specific shots towards the end of the film, they were visually striking from how they depict memory, and at least to my own perception, the depiction of RUMINATION.
The obvious inspiration was with the text, which I took from the outro credits and title card of the movie, which I personally fell in love with especially with the context of the movie, so I made my own slightly-modified version to fit with my vision.
For the pictures themselves, they were all taken on my Tecno Spark Slim and was fully edited using Affinity. I kept in mind my current style of photography with the grain and collage style that I’ve adopted, and laser-focused to make these visually-striking visuals that I was so blown away from the movie, except in my own way where I focus more on how we as people tend to look back at memories a little distorted, especially when trying to explain the memories we have to others.
It’s almost like trying to explain what a dog is to someone who has never seen a dog before and telling them to draw a picture of a dog. In my case, it would be telling my memory to someone who was not there and told them to visualize it. I personally think that this is what the person could see, at least when I try to visualize my memories, this is what I see.
It’s a fascinating concept to me that there really is no one “truth” in any memory, even if the person I had the memory with tried to explain the exact memory in a visual way, they’d fully remember it in a whole different way than I would personally do.
Quite existential thinking, but within these thoughts and memories and lessons that I learn over time, there will always be RUMINATION in the process, in fact, I think that this will be the most important part of who I am, who I was, and who I want to become. Without RUMINATION, I would not be who I am today. Whether that’s a good thing or not is completely up to interpretation, but at least in my own head, this is what helps me to get to a place where I feel like I have completely moved on, completely processed everything that happened, to completely feel free from these anxious thoughts, ironically.
Running away from these thoughts is temporary, going through the process of RUMINATION is what gets me to a place of acceptance, that there isn’t always an answer, there isn’t always a resolve, there isn’t always a positive ending, that life is always going to throw a curve-ball at me no matter the circumstance.
