I struggle to talk about... is a submission for The Phaistos Project – Forty-Five Symbols.

Our set of 45 symbols was inspired by the topic of hardships. Hardships tend to shape people's lives, and going through them alone can be stressful and painful. But sometimes talking about them can be just as difficult as the hardship itself. From mental health and addiction to confrontation and saying "I love you", these topics can be hard to tackel head on with the stigma surrounding them or societal pressure to act a certain way.

This project focuses on those hard conversations and abstracts the soundwave of someone expressing the hardship into a visual language that can be non-verbally communicated. Expressing the topic and visualizing the internal struggle as a symbol. The symbols can be used as a starter to hard conversation and bring humanity together.

COLLABORATION Codie Chang, Florence Dreier YEAR 2020