Remembering My Nature
On witnessing myself and choosing to stay
Words / JENNIFER BOURNE
Photos / JESSIE MCNAUGHT
How the body becomes a place you return to.
I started this post intending to write about my experience doing a fully nude shoot in nature. I have always been drawn to experiences that push me outside of my comfort zone, and this felt like one that would teach me something. I am used to being behind the scenes, behind the camera, art directing, producing, and planning, but being in front of the camera is a different story. My critical eye is sharper when aimed at myself. Still, I have always been drawn to self-expression through art, through movement, through any medium. The moment I heard about See Your Nature, the beautiful brainchild of Jessie McNaught, I knew I had to do it.
What began as a reflection on that experience became something deeper. It opened into a story about my body, and my very complicated relationship with it.
My body has held more sorrow and fear than any body should carry. At times, it has felt like a friend or a loved one who keeps leaving without saying goodbye, someone I never know when, or if, they will return. For most of my life, my relationship with it has been defined by that uncertainty.
From a young age, I experienced unexplained aches and symptoms that came and went without warning. I learned early to push through, to ignore, to carry on. But when it got loud, it brought me to tears. Tests showed nothing. I was told it was growing pains. Later, in high school, it escalated. Widespread connective tissue issues sidelined me from sports, something that had been central to my life. Again, no answers. Just explanations that never quite fit.
Over time, those symptoms became diagnoses. Chronic pain. Chronic illness. Years of medications, in cycles. Doctors who did not listen. Periods of isolation and deep depression. I struggled to explain something I did not fully understand myself. From the outside, I looked healthy. Functional. Fine. But inside, my body felt unpredictable. Adversarial. Something I could not trust.
There are years that felt like they were taken from me. Not just time, but the experience of living.
COVID marked a turning point. It shifted the trajectory of my life in ways I could not have anticipated. I moved to a different country, returned home, said goodbye to a partner I thought was forever, and lost a dear friend to brain cancer. I felt broken in ways I did not yet have language for.
My body has held more sorrow and fear than any body should carry.
At the same time, my body unravelled. I developed an undiagnosable neuro immuno endocrine dysfunction that left me incapacitated. My body began attacking itself in ways I could not control, and layered with grief and untreated ADHD, I came undone. Between hospital visits, endless appointments, and therapy, I turned inward and uncovered something I had not wanted to admit. I liked myself, but I did not truly love myself.
That absence of love showed up as abandonment. No boundaries. No clear sense of what I wanted. No real anchor in myself. I began to see that the relationship I had with my body reflected that. I did not trust it. In defiance, I pushed against it rather than care for it.
The summer I turned forty, something shifted. I could no longer fight what was happening. I had to start listening. My body could not tolerate the treatments, and I was faced with two paths. Stay and begin a drug protocol that would strip me of my quality of life, or leave and give myself even the slightest chance to heal. I chose the unknown.
Alone in a foreign country, I met myself in the quiet, in that space between breaking and becoming. I turned toward nature, toward stillness, toward anything that could hold what medicine could not. I began to question the life I had been trying to force, and the version of myself I thought I was supposed to be.
I grieved what had not come. The life I thought I would have. The milestones that may never arrive. I had no partner, no children, no home, only the one I carried within me.
So I made a choice. Not to fix myself, but to stay. To come back into my body and make it a place I could live in again. To meet it with care instead of resistance. To learn how to love it, even when it felt broken, unpredictable, and beyond my control.
Slowly, something began to shift.
I wanted to document my home, both the place and the body I live in. This vessel that has worked so hard to keep me alive. The shoot became a way of meeting myself inside it. Not as something to fix, but as something to stay with. A quiet act of witnessing. Of choosing not to turn away.
As the day approached, I ended up in the hospital again. Another immune and allergy flare. But this time, something shifted. I let people in. I allowed myself to be supported. I did not face it alone.
When the sun returned for a few brief days in October, I moved forward with the shoot. Not from pressure, but from love. I am learning when to push and when to soften. That healing is not linear. It asks for both surrender and strength.
So I stayed.
I stood in my body as it is. Not healed. Not fixed. But here. Still carrying me.
This strong, complicated, resilient body.
Am I healthy? Yes. No. Sometimes. No one really knows.
Am I healed? Not yet.
Does my body still fail me? Yes.
But I will not abandon it anymore.
I hold it differently now. With patience. With presence. With care.
Because this body, unpredictable and extraordinary, is still my home. And I am learning that home is not a place where everything is fixed. It is a place you choose to stay.
Words / JENNIFER BOURNE
Photos / JESSIE MCNAUGHT
Subscribe
