Gallery by Hyunsuh Choi

Photos hold memories, and memories bring back emotions.

Each snapshot is meant to preserve the essence of something fleeting, a moment caught in the shuttered eyes of a camera lens. Yet, when reality shifts and the familiar becomes foreign, those images become more than just echoes – they become a lifeline. An attempt to capture the intangible, to make visible what was once ignored, and to bring light to scenes long cast into shadows.

And perhaps, by the time my gallery began to overflow with scenes of chaos, I might have already assumed that my silent cry for visibility would be drowned out in a world that refused to see.

My younger sister was a carefree girl. She sang and danced in front of my family with reckless abandon, talked nonstop for hours, and somehow still found the energy to run around the house. She was alive in every sense of the world – never still, never silent – until her laughter withdrew from our halls. It was as if the sky and the ground had flipped, shifting from vibrant hues to a stark grayscale. Our canary in the coal mine had gone radio silent.

What began with a few scattered outbursts quickly escalated out of control, and the girl I loved started to retreat into the darkness no one could fully comprehend. One moment, we were trying to hold onto some semblance of normalcy; the next, our home was shambles, shattered objects scattering like the fragments of the fragile peace we had already lost. In the hall where her laughter had faded, her screams now echoed. She hurled anything within reach, lashing out at me, my mom, and my dad with a fury that didn’t belong to the sister I knew. The night she attempted to run out of the house was the first time we had to hold her down. Not to restrain, but to protect. Both her and us from the harm she didn’t realise she was causing. Something was terribly wrong, yet none of us could entirely lay a finger on it.

It horrified me—the way her hand grabbed the Christmas tree, sending crystal shards of broken ornaments skidding across the floor, the way she pounded on the closed door of my room, wrenching the doorknob as if to break it, the way she tore down the curtains. Each act seemed to target not just objects but us, with a rage that felt both alien and intensely personal.

And there was only one thing I could think of – documenting it. I hit the recording button not out of desire but because it felt like the only way to bring our invisible struggles into the light. I needed proof to make those with the power to help us to see the reality we were trapped in. My gallery filled up with brutal sights: images of bruises, scratches, bite marks, and fresh streaks of blood – visible wounds inflicted not by a stranger but by the person my family loved the most. With each scream, each wound, I feared we were being pushed further into a hell from which we might never return. We were stuck in a crisis none of us knew how to escape.

At that time, the darkness enveloping my home was so suffocating that it pressed against my chest and throat. The walls seemed to close in, not from the outside, but from within. I can’t forget how I hesitated at the front door every day after school, dreading what awaited me on the other side. There was violence in my home. But it wasn’t anyone’s fault. My sister didn’t cause the pain; it was a force that controlled her – an unseen, dark illness that had wrapped its tendrils around her and us, consuming her from within. We were all victims, yet there was no one to blame, no scapegoat to pin for a suffering that was entirely our own. And there was nobody to answer the dilemma that tore us apart – how do you cope with being hurt by someone you love, knowing they’re as much a victim as you?

So we went to the hospital—a place that claimed sanctuary for those in distress and refuge for those grappling with invisible battles—at least, that’s what I had always believed.

The emergency room was sterile, walls blindingly white. The silence was oppressive, and the scent of antiseptic was so overpowering it seemed to scrub away any trace of human suffering. The sense of erasure was so intense that I felt like I might vanish along with it. My sister lay calm and still on the bed as if the chaos that brought us here had never occurred. We told the doctors that we were scared – scared for her, scared for ourselves. I naïvely believed that showing my collected evidence would prompt them to offer the help we so desperately needed. I tried to explain that the sister lying on the gurney was not the same person who had been in our home – the one whose mind unravelled under the restlessness of her own internal chaos. The doctor’s indifferent voice cut through the room, reducing our messy turmoil into a mere inconvenience.

“Is she suicidal?” “No. But–”

“Then there’s nothing we can do. We will be discharging her soon.”

What was the value of our pleas if only a threat to life was deemed worthy of intervention?

My sister wasn’t considered violent enough to grab their attention. Their danger standards dismissed the care and treatment she needed. The depth of our distress was invisible in a realm where severity is only measured by immediacy. It was as if the right to seek care was reserved only for those whose suffering was visibly catastrophic. They treated our crisis as just another case to be shuffled aside. Each discharge followed another, silently signalling that our pain was not worthy of addressing. We were invalidated, and the invalidated can often be disregarded.

I have always been taught to ask for help when I need it. So I did. But no one told me that asking for help didn’t guarantee receiving it, even when it was deserved. No one prepared me for the reality that a desperate cry for visibility could disappear, consumed by a ruthless force defining worth. I learned too late that sometimes, even the loudest pleas can be lost in an echoing void, where the silence speaks louder than any response.

The sense of invisibility was not only confined to the sterile walls of the emergency room; it seeped into every corner of our lives. My sister’s nails dug into my flesh, leaving a cut deep enough to bleed out. I stared at the scarlet red blooming like a twisted flower, trickling down my hand as I crouched into the front seat of our car, trying to shield myself. We were lapsed into an uncomfortable silence when she suddenly lunged forward from the back seat, grabbing my hair and yanking it back with a force that scared me. Her screams pierced the air again – except they sounded lost, crying out for a comfort that we couldn’t provide. It felt like she was gripping not only my hair but also my lungs, squeezing until I could no longer breathe.

“That’s not my sister“. I whispered to myself. “I’m okay“. Somewhere in the middle of the horror and fear washing over me, I could hear the faint apologies of my parents, muffled by wailing screams that wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t okay. None of it was.

The hospital we drove straight to assigned us a social worker at the moment they decided my sister’s condition was a behavioural issue. The psychiatrist we needed never came. My videos didn’t even stand a chance to be played.

“Go tie her down,” she said. “There’s no state law preventing it.” I felt numb.

Those words were the response given to a family hanging by a thread. A family so desperate that, after facing countless dismissals, we still had to return to that very place on our own feet, clinging to a faint hope for a different answer. We had to push aside the resignation of cruel reality and yearn for a glimmer of understanding. What my sister deserved was an acknowledgment of her need for proper treatment and perhaps a gesture of genuine compassion.

Instead, they suggested treating her like an animal.

In a moment when humanity demanded empathy, I was met with a cold, mechanical statement. It wasn’t even a solution; it was a denial of our struggle – a profound rejection of our need to be seen and heard, our necessity for some form of visibility.

Would they ever know what it felt like to hold down your own sister as she screamed, seeing ceaseless tears dripping down her face? Would they ever know the anguish of returning to the place that was supposed to be our refuge, only to find it repeatedly failing us? They would never truly understand, and they hadn’t even made the slightest effort to try. I was told numerous times that my family was falling apart – and they were okay with that.

It took months before a name was finally given to my sister’s condition. The very condition that had been dismissed dozens of times in many different hospitals brushed off as a “behavioural issue” turned out to be a rare and severe mental health condition called catatonia.

And that proved nothing more than the fact that I was right. All the damages have already been done. They should have seen us when I tried to reveal the vivid nightmare we were living and heard our pleas for help earlier. Scars were permanently embedded not only on my skin but also in my mind, along with the unseen proof in my gallery. Watching her go through episode after episode, lose the childish brightness, the life in her eyes, and kneeling before something that controlled her involuntarily was a sight that rotted me inside out. The healthcare system acted only when pushed to the very edge, forcing us to endure prolonged agony. Her illness was involuntary, but the suffering was not inevitable.

My family did not deserve any of what happened to us. We should have been visible.

Looking back at my gallery, it doesn’t feel like a distant memory but rather a vivid snapshot, a recording that plays over and over in my mind. Each photo and video hold a different yet equally harrowing story. The emotions remain as raw as the day it happened, each memory hitting with the same intensity. Those scars refuse to heal – remaining as palpable testaments to flesh that had broken down and bled crimson, a lasting memory that no one besides me could understand. Each photo and video bear witness to an invisible torment that the world chose to ignore. Photos held memories, and memories brought back emotions.

And I still can’t bring myself to delete any of them.

There are things you hold onto, not because you want to, but because you have to. These are the anchors that kept me grounded when everything else was slipping away. The undeniable proof that we were there, that we fought, that we mattered. Without them, I fear we’ll become invisible again, our reality dismissed and forgotten as if it never happened. They are my last defence against invisibility, my way of securing the visibility we fought so hard to claim.

But I dream of the day when I can finally let go – when these reminders of fear, locked in the past but never lost from memory, no longer weigh me down. When my gallery is no longer a record of survival, but a testament to the light we’ve reclaimed, filled not with the tears of those days, but with the warmth of my sister’s smile.

Illustration by Laura Darling