There are things the body holds that the mind cannot name. Emotions that live in the chest like weather—shifting, unspoken, and sometimes indescribable. This book is a record of those storms.

 

:): traces Cecilia’s experience of living with bipolar disorder during a period of profound transition—moving to another continent, losing access to psychiatric care, and coming off her medications for the first time in five years. In the stillness between support systems, in a country not yet called home, she turned to images. To what could be held, torn, soaked, lifted, and remade.

 

Each image began as a Polaroid, taken at the precise moment her mood demanded to be seen. They were not curated. They were felt. Then, through the delicate process of emulsion lifting—where the image layer is gently separated from the plastic in warm water and then placed onto a new surface—she gave the intangible a fragile, malleable form. Just as her mind shifted shape, so did the images, as she let their thin layer of emulsion warp and then settle in a way that felt accurate to her state at the time.

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The result is not a diagnosis. Not a diary. Not a cry for help. It is an attempt—raw, intuitive, and imperfect—to give an internal reality an external shape. To create something honest in a time of disorientation and emergence. To say: this is what it felt like.

 

The title, :):, is a symbol, a tattoo, and a reminder. Two faces in tension. A nod to polarity. A mark of survival.

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This is not a resolution. It’s a witnessing.