Some of the systems I now share through MikoCare began with a personal practice: recording experience, returning to it, and noticing what became visible over time.
Beginning in 2011, photographs, writing, and public and private journaling became ways of witnessing my experience through substantial life changes. That practice continued through cancer treatment, reconstruction, and the years afterward.
Social media was part of that environment. I used it for expression, relationship, observation, poetry, humor, spiritual exploration, and developing ideas. Sometimes I posted while distressed. Sometimes writing helped me express something before I could fully understand it.
I wanted to make room for the range of my experience, including what was difficult to reconcile, name, or put into orderly language.
Returning to the record
A photograph or post preserved something I could encounter again. When memories resurfaced, or I revisited earlier writing, I could notice recurring questions, changes in language, contradictions, and connections I had missed.
The record contains what I experienced, believed, wondered about, or tried at the time. My understanding has continued to change. Earlier explorations remain part of that history, with their original context and uncertainty.
This is an ongoing personal inquiry. Its value includes the ability to revisit an interpretation, recognize a change of mind, or see an earlier experience differently.
Simple enough to keep using
I needed practices simple enough to return to wherever I was, across changes in energy, attention, and emotional state. At a minimum, I could take a photograph or write something using only my phone.
That simplicity made the practice robust. Participation could be as small as one photograph or a few words, with room to return and reflect when I had more capacity.
Practices becoming systems
All By My Selfies developed as a practice of visual self-witnessing. Photographs preserve moments of embodied life and allow relationships between those moments to become visible over time. An image can hold something without requiring an explanation.
The Living Novel brings writing, photographs, everyday events, imagination, and participation into an evolving experience of authorship. It creates ways to encounter and work with material accumulated across a life.
These are distinct systems with intersecting histories. Their structure emerged through use: preserving material, returning to it, and discovering useful ways to hold and navigate it.
How this informs MikoCare
This history informs my attention to the relationship between a person and the systems around them: what an arrangement makes possible, what it asks of someone, and whether it leaves room for changing circumstances and understanding.
It also informs how I approach inquiry: noticing what is happening before deciding what it means. I leave room for unfinished thinking, different forms of expression, and revision.
The archive shows the lived process from which that approach developed—including difficulty, experimentation, play, and change. It remains available for further inquiry.