Back Pain, Philip Y

“I've had that fantasy of wishing this person who doesn't seem to get it -  I wish I could literally loan it to them for like 48 hours. I don't necessarily blame most people who don't get it. Because if you haven't experienced it, you don't know what the chronic part of pain is. That word is the part that I think people have trouble with. Everybody's had some sort of physical pain. 

But it's the day-to-day of it that I think is so hard to kind of transmit that I generally don't even try. Pain has taken away a degree of freedom. Not all of it, but some, mostly with walking and that kind of activity, you know, and the spontaneity and it's, it's taken away a certain normalcy that I probably took for granted.

I think mucky is a good color because I think the pain takes away color for me. I mean, it takes away metaphorically the color of life in some ways. The pain almost always influences my photography. It makes me quicker because I just have less patience in general, when I'm experiencing pain. And so because of that and maybe it's a good thing, frankly, I don't get perfectionistic about it. I want it to look a certain way. And if I get close to that, it's good enough for me and I just kind of move on because the process of agonizing over it actually hurts.”