Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis is a visual diary depicting a personal story of illness and its aftermath on my body and psyche.
I woke up one morning, a few days after my 26th birthday, with an ache in my knee that came out of the blue. By the evening I had to run to the ER for morphine and had to repeat the same for the following three days to cope with an unspeakable pain, which clearly was an alarming sign of what was about to come into my life.
It took four months to receive a wrong diagnosis—too optimistic indeed—followed by an unnecessary surgery, before the final diagnosis became clear: osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer that generally affects young people.
There was a sense of paralysis, then a strange excitement, followed by so many whys. I underwent a second surgery: part of my tibia and my knee were removed and replaced with a prosthetic bone and knee. I woke up on a metal bed after nine hours of imposed sleep, during which my consciousness wandered through the mystery of the ether.
"It was a beautiful experience" were my first words, before fully reentering my body and coming to terms with a pain that felt like torture. Such extreme pain changed something in my psyche that I am not able to explain through words, and it took many years to recollect parts of myself that felt gone forever.
The images portray a symbolic catharsis of endurance, surrender, loneliness, and healing.
Metamorphosis certainly refers to the physical and spiritual transformation I had no choice but to embark on, navigating through compression, similar to a rebirth. Photographed with a phone during 100 post-surgery sleepless nights, the act of photographing was a way to crystallize externally an intensity within—a way not to go insane and to make sense of the surreal life I felt no longer in control of.
Photographing that time in my life was also a reminder that such a situation was temporary, a way to prove to myself that I could still create something beautiful out of it.
Metamorphosis also reconnects to Kafka’s story, in which the character becomes a burden to family and friends. I felt trapped in a Kafkaesque situation, in which I saw many previously close people disappear, turning their backs in my most fragile moments.
Such betrayal became a strong fuel to regain strength and to find my own center, my own ground. It made me love more deeply those few who stayed, and it taught me so much about the human psyche, about love and family. It also made my values and sense of self-worth much firmer and uncompromising.
But above all, this metamorphosis was a sort of initiation into a new paradigm of understanding: we are the creators of our own lives. Challenges are not failures but redirections. We might not control what challenges come to us, but we always have a choice in how we face them. Illness can be a gift for transformation, and love is the only medicine that truly counts.
I woke up one morning, a few days after my 26th birthday, with an ache in my knee that came out of the blue. By the evening I had to run to the ER for morphine and had to repeat the same for the following three days to cope with an unspeakable pain, which clearly was an alarming sign of what was about to come into my life.
It took four months to receive a wrong diagnosis—too optimistic indeed—followed by an unnecessary surgery, before the final diagnosis became clear: osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer that generally affects young people.
There was a sense of paralysis, then a strange excitement, followed by so many whys. I underwent a second surgery: part of my tibia and my knee were removed and replaced with a prosthetic bone and knee. I woke up on a metal bed after nine hours of imposed sleep, during which my consciousness wandered through the mystery of the ether.
"It was a beautiful experience" were my first words, before fully reentering my body and coming to terms with a pain that felt like torture. Such extreme pain changed something in my psyche that I am not able to explain through words, and it took many years to recollect parts of myself that felt gone forever.
The images portray a symbolic catharsis of endurance, surrender, loneliness, and healing.
Metamorphosis certainly refers to the physical and spiritual transformation I had no choice but to embark on, navigating through compression, similar to a rebirth. Photographed with a phone during 100 post-surgery sleepless nights, the act of photographing was a way to crystallize externally an intensity within—a way not to go insane and to make sense of the surreal life I felt no longer in control of.
Photographing that time in my life was also a reminder that such a situation was temporary, a way to prove to myself that I could still create something beautiful out of it.
Metamorphosis also reconnects to Kafka’s story, in which the character becomes a burden to family and friends. I felt trapped in a Kafkaesque situation, in which I saw many previously close people disappear, turning their backs in my most fragile moments.
Such betrayal became a strong fuel to regain strength and to find my own center, my own ground. It made me love more deeply those few who stayed, and it taught me so much about the human psyche, about love and family. It also made my values and sense of self-worth much firmer and uncompromising.
But above all, this metamorphosis was a sort of initiation into a new paradigm of understanding: we are the creators of our own lives. Challenges are not failures but redirections. We might not control what challenges come to us, but we always have a choice in how we face them. Illness can be a gift for transformation, and love is the only medicine that truly counts.