Mum always moved like she had the eyes of passerbys on her, a trait typical of a former beauty queen. Hair only ever so slightly uplifted by a seasonal ocean wind and her arms casually tucked into her sleeves to shield from the cold, I chose to respond to her silhouette through the legerdemain of image as the sunset began its peak. It’s tonalities remarking on the cloud-crossed skyline, forging itself across the ocean backdrop. The flash on the Canon T-50 my grandparents had loaned me clicked over. Brief inspections of the ISO settings matched the initial decision. I raised the glass to eye level and took the shot.

In the past I’ve attempted to write about these opening months of 2014 in a way that pays homage to their lucidity, in efforts to fully recapture those dazed moments of aftershock I experienced in the wake of a first break-up. But I cannot linger upon those devastating times. It is easier said than done to take on the mantle of bravery. Not only was it the first time I’d had a boyfriend, but it was a relationship that almost killed me and left my body out on the road. Returning home every night in the aftermath of that separation continually left me feeling like something was caught in my throat. Like I was to blame for being stupid enough to stay with him despite everything.

I remember my hateful self talk and, looking back, it makes me glad that I learned to be more gentle with myself over time. Like many people experiencing abusive relationships, the extent of the damage was unbeknown to me until way after it was finished and the stigma and accompanying silence of queerness (I wasn’t out to my parents then) only made it more difficult to realise what had happened. During that period my mind was on rewind, tape strings whipping rapidly back into their sockets, all friction and radio static. Whole snatches of time feel suspiciously absent when I try to remember them.

That evening with my mum down by the beach, where I encouraged her into being a subject, was one of those nights that affixed itself to my history so firmly that I can’t possibly disentangle it. It burned itself in that way, I think, because of the camera – it’s something I’ve grown to be grateful for.

We know that one of the effects of trauma is that memories often can’t be stored or relied upon in the same way that they were previously. In Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal book The Body Keeps the Score, he writes:

Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli.

I knew that my new hobby had, completely circumstantially, become my lifeline as I acclimated to this new me. It was like I was trying to interpret myself from across a great divide, using one of the only methods I had to do so.

The images accumulated on my hard drive and Facebook photo albums, and I began to realise they created an external memory bank too, one to lean into, to survey and validate the sense that I was actually a real person existing within the world, engaging meaningfully with the people around me. John Berger notes that:

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

I had the proof of actualisation in these intimate portraits of family and friends, staring down the lens, seeing each other in all of our clarity, and it let me re-order and re-prioritise these memories. It pinned me down firmly to my reality, made me feel like I was actually existing among my environment, and unstuck me from my worrying and lingering sense of dread. It was a textural tool that was ultimately salvational.

In his book, van der Kolk reiterates that self-analytical story-telling as a means of building a personal narrative is something we must do in order to bring meaning and structure to our lives. We can hardly do that if we are in a constant state of detachment and fear, lacking the ability to draw upon our memories and feeling uncertain of their tangibility.

The western interpretation of “mindfulness” places an unsteady weight on the responsibility of the individual – if you aren’t following the right practices and if it isn’t producing results for you, then you are the one who is broken, rather than it being the failure of a simplistic methodology that commercial mindfulness often proposes.

One of the many tenets of traditional mindfulness is to produce an awareness and presence in our lives, to be actively within the world, something purportedly tarnished by a technocratic hyper-connected population uncomfortable with our feelings. Many traumatised people are at odds with this kind of vulnerability, and pathologically learn to dissociate as self-protection without realising it. Some wounds run deeper underground, those valleys of trauma that soothing music, deep breathing and peaceful visualisation that you learn in a counsellor’s office cannot always fix.

Mindfulness came to me in a more organic way – through the responsibility of photography. And by that token, a technique borne from a continually watchful eye, surveying and appreciating details in the landscape.

Using old cameras means approaching the practice with an unlikely tenderness. It also means considering my shots with finesse. When you only have 24 of them to last you until your next roll, things become a bit less automatic. Taking photos of my friends and loved ones has provided me a curious sense of purpose while I work my shit out. It was hard not to be reminded of the support and love that bled from them and intertwined with my own condition, becoming clearly represented on matte paper as I made those realisations.

• Jonno Revanche is a writer and the editor of Vaein Zine