“Sweet, mournful ecstacy.”

Portraits can be powerful tools to help reflect to us our feelings about ourselves from the past, the present or future. Annah, one of the My Name Story project participants got a first glimpse of her portrait at the Have You Eaten? exhibit at Slip Gallery.

When I asked her what emotions she saw in her portrait, she replied,

I was having an emo moment recently. I wrote a poem that ended with the line sweet, mournful ecstacy and I feel like that’s…yeah… There’s a lot of thinking about me, my mom, a lot of innocence and trauma, how to incorporate that as an adult…