There are days when I feel that I am running out of patience with my own thoughts. Not because there is one particular thing I cannot tolerate, but because there are too many things that keep asking to be tolerated. In Venezuela, the electricity situation has become one of those things. Power cuts that used to last a few hours can now take five, six, seven, sometimes eight hours, at almost any time of the day. You can lose electricity in the morning and get it back in the afternoon, or lose it in the evening and spend half the night waiting. There is nothing especially interesting about complaining about this. It is frustrating, inconvenient, and sometimes genuinely serious, especially when the same situation affects hospitals, clinics, businesses, homes, and people whose daily lives already require more effort than they should. But I do not want to write another post about how unbearable everything is. I am tired of that sentence. I am tired of saying it, reading it, thinking it, and realizing that tomorrow I might have to say it again.
What interests me more is what this does to a person after a while. There is a strange familiarity that develops around things that should never become familiar. People continue with their routines. They wait for the power to come back. They charge their phones when they can. They adjust their schedules. They complain for a while and then continue doing whatever needs to be done. I do not think that necessarily means we are indifferent or resigned. Sometimes there is simply a limit to how much attention a person can give to something they cannot control. At some point, survival becomes practical. You stop asking yourself whether something is fair and start asking yourself whether you can finish what you were doing before the lights went out. That is perhaps the part I find most unsettling. Not the darkness itself, but how quickly the mind learns to accommodate it.
Photography has always given me another way of dealing with that. I have never considered myself a great photographer, and I have no need to. I photograph when I have time, when I have the energy, before work, after work, on a day off, sometimes more often and sometimes hardly at all. What matters to me is not whether a photograph is technically impressive. I care about why I took it. I care about what made me stop for a second and look closely at something that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Some of the photographs I have taken during these years probably say more about my circumstances than I intended them to. There is beauty in some of them, but there is also the awareness of where that beauty exists. Sometimes I photograph because something is beautiful. Sometimes I photograph because I need to remember that I was able to notice something beautiful at all.
Maybe that is why I keep coming back to the present. I have a life that exists beyond electricity cuts, beyond frustration, beyond whatever is happening around me. I am a mother, a daughter, a girlfriend, a worker, a person with responsibilities and ordinary interests. I have days that are good, days that are exhausting, and days when I simply want to be left alone with my thoughts. There is always the temptation to think about everything at once. What could change? How long would it take? What could one person actually do? And if something could be changed, would I even live long enough to see the result? Those questions can become completely useless if I allow them to occupy every minute of my day. They do not give me control. They only give me more things to worry about.
So this is not really a complaint about the electricity, although it began there. It is more about the effort of remaining mentally present when reality constantly gives you reasons not to be. I do not want to spend my life angry at things I cannot personally fix. I do not want every photograph I take to become evidence of everything that is wrong around me. Sometimes I just want to look at something, frame it, take the picture, and let that moment be exactly what it was. Maybe that is not much. Maybe it changes nothing. But for a few minutes, it keeps me from turning every inconvenience into an existential question and every unanswered question into anxiety. Before I lose my mind, I think I need that pause.
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.
