Unsent Apology

This work began with a personal question: What does it mean to confront the body I neglected? As a competitive athlete, I often pushed myself past my limits, ignoring signs of physical strain until my body could no longer keep up. That disregard eventually compromised my immune system and led to a diagnosis I didn't expect and couldn't fully comprehend at the time. Rather than expressing this experience through imagery, I chose to work with the most direct and clinical material available: my original diagnostic documents. During the long process of identifying my condition, I had undergone repeated hospital visits and tests, leaving me with a thick stack of unfamiliar medical records. I began copying them by hand, repeatedly. This repetitive act became a form of obsessive reflection, a way to engage with and better understand what my body had been trying to tell me. Slowly, what began as transcription began to feel like a letter, an unspoken apology to myself. The text is written on coarse paper to give it the feel of a relic, something aged and preserved. I imagined what it might have been like to be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in a time before modern medicine, when the illness would have felt both mysterious and irreversible. The final piece is displayed on a lighted pedestal, evoking the visual of an artifact in a museum, something discovered, not made. Its letter-like form is intentional; it serves as a written apology to my own body for years of neglect, a belated gesture of acknowledgment and care. Ironically, it was through this laborious process that I finally began to comprehend what the documents said. I had never taken the time to read them until I physically wrote them out.