I re-read my journal from time to time to get a pulse on the normalcy of what I’m going through. I’ve kept the same journal for three years and this is the year I can look back on what I’ve written and piece together the patterns and rhythms of my years. I’ve always felt depressed, ugly, directionless in March.  These feelings will pass, they’re seasonal, not circumstantial, and will come back next year. I’ll get through march dozens and dozens more times, and it will likely never be a good time.

What was a little more constant throughout the years was this existential “what am I going to do with my life”/”what do I want to do with my life?” I have so instances of “I want to write, I want to create, I want to work from home, for myself” packed into the last three years. Something I wrote last year still really resonated with me now was “I feel overwhelmed by the space I am supposed to fill, I am only occupying a fraction of it.” 

A third thought pattern was this desire to clear my head. For years I’ve been musing about needing to meditate and be on my phone less. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. When I was without a phone for five days last month I was lightweight, inspired, grounded, present and open to what was going on around me. I noticed that the boy next to me, had the most delicate face and hands, a floppy halo of curls, and had matched laptop, notebook, phone case and water bottle, all brandished in electric yellow. I noticed the long silver strands in a man’s hair, and watched the employee across the table compose himself over and over in the midst of conversation with a problematic customer. I watched heads duck into instagram and not come up for air. I think the anti-social media fad is corny, but I also recognize that my addiction to mindlessly scrolling is so real, and it’s throwing things off balance. 

In the book “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,” Deepak Chopra unpacks “laws” that govern our non-physical lives. The book is flowery, illustriously spiritual, latent with weird mysticism and a little hard to take seriously at points, but I find that these “laws” really are so evident in our lives. One that really resonated with me was the law of karma, in that energy is perfectly balanced in an ebb and flow, from you and to you, back and forth forever. This karma extends past our own moral compasses of keeping promises, telling the truth and being kind, it really orchestrates everything that we put into the world around us. This is a premise that’s shaped how I handle money, how I set intentions and I’m working on letting it shape how I handle what I consume. When I’m spending hours on hours on instagram mindlessly consuming and not matching that with hours of creating, it becomes gluttony. I become backlogged with what I’m taking in, most of which isn’t substantial, and am not able to counterbalance this consumption with creation. What was a beautifully world-shrinking means of inspiration turns into mindless, constant indulgence. 

It was honestly disheartening to read from march 2016, 2017 and to still be expressing the same sentiments in march 2018. Wanting less mental chatter. less consumption. more direction. wanting measurable steps towards an actual career in photography or writing or both. All things I’ve tried to enact time and time again and have lacked the discipline to see through. The bigger picture of longitudinal introspection is comforting but also intimidating. I see desire that are consistent and show me they have staying power that is worth investing time and energy. So this go around is focused on matching the consistency of what I want with consistency in what I’m doing. Consistently making space, time, and silence to get wherever I’m going. 

shooting film has been a long standing pillar of my “to-do” list and it finally found fruition this week. I’d been working on this roll since mid November but never actually allowed it to become anything. I’ve still got five rolls of undeveloped film sitting in my glove box and I have no idea whats on them..

I had been intentionally avoiding getting anything developed because by shooting film, I had relinquished creative control; forfeited the ability to shoot, evaluate, adjust and reshoot as many times as needed to get the exact photo I planned. I was eager to see the photos but the thought of having to face an un-actualized creative vision was preemptively embarrassing, enough to keep me stagnant. I felt physically sick when I got the scans in my inbox on Wednesday afternoon

 Of course, these are some of my favorite photos I’ve taken in the seven years I’ve been shooting. I remember taking the photo above and praying that my settings were right and that it was immortalized as I saw it in real time. I thought about this picture all the time before having ever seen it. It was the first photo I looked for when I opened the files and my heart soared when I found it. The glowing window, the bed messy with clothes and towels familiar to only us, and the red rug that actually made our room feel like home. And of course, Jason butt ass naked, talking to me while he gets ready for his day. It was a bright moment in an un-bright month. The slowness of these photos, the weeks (months) between shooting and seeing proved to amplify the gratification of the finished product. 

all of these photos were particularly special because they were taken in a pointedly dark part of 2017, but you would never know, because they are white washed, softly glowing, tender. I was facing an all encompassing shit show around the time I took these. Without digging into the grit of it all, I was at odds with every aspect of my life: personally, professionally, physically, financially, spiritually, interpersonally, etc etc etc. I was pitted with homesickness and it was raining all the fucking time (duh, Portland, but I was not ready it). And then, randomly, on this day, the sun came out and stayed all day I was able to remember that eventually I’d be okay. The bands of sunlight plucked a pang of affection towards my new life that had yet to measure up to my expectations for it.

For as long as I’ve avoided them, I’m realizing slow processes yield the sweetest results. I’ve been writing more. I’ve been treating my body better. I’ve been building a life away from home. I’m shooting when I can. The scary notion that nothing will ever become anything and it will be more embarrassing to have tried and failed is still there, and honestly, not moving feels better than actively inching towards something with the possibility of never getting there.  I’m verbally circumnavigating the phrase “fear of failure” but that’s exactly what it all comes down to, A poster-cliche phrase peppered through the halls of public schools is more relevant to me now than when I was 15 and didn’t even register failure as an option.

I’m very aware of my need for control over my circumstance and itch for instant gratification. I can’t approach these things as a personal shortcoming  because I get important shit done quickly and I’m a master at making a plan where there is a definitive point A and B. ask me about my spreadsheets, but these nuts and bolts of my personhood are a hard force to reckon with when they show up as an aversion to the slow processes. So I’m learning to approach them anyways and  embrace the deep discomfort of not knowing when, or where or how, or if it will all amount to anything at all. But slow movement is still so good There is no instant gratification that provides the really good stuff like summers in Portland, a healthy relationship with your body and the perfect photo of the most beautiful dog in the world (shot on portra 400 BABY).

I moved across the country four months ago. It was a move that was a year in the making, but I’d wanted to live on the west coast for as long as I can remember. So I graduated college, worked/drank all summer and on august 11th, I stopped by my favorite bagel shop for my usual order one last time. and then I drove as far west as I could get.

a third of a year later (holy shit) and I feel displaced. even though this move was on my own accord and it’s something I am very proud of and very excited about, it’s not home. Of course it’s not. it’s four months and 3,000 miles away from the last fifteen years of my life. 

I’ve known forever that I have a deep affinity for personal spaces. For bedrooms with oriental rugs, white beds and as much sunlight as possible. For alone time and windowsills cluttered with beautiful things. Moving in with my partner on a whim was a hard hurdle to jump, not for reasons of incompatibility or only knowing each other for four months (lol) but rather because it was hard to stomach not having space that was my very own corner of the world. I cried every night for two weeks just at the thought of my room in my old apartment, a perfectly decorated safe haven. Then we switched over to white sheets and a white comforter, and bought a rug and a plant and everything was better. Home as a comfortable space is easy to implement wherever I go, home as a feeling has proven a tricky thing to catch. It’s a feeling I’m not really sure is transferrable from place to place, just buildable.

I used to be astounded when people would move back to the neighborhood I spent the last four years in. It was like high school and suburbia all in one. It was tiny. A too-tight but well intentioned embrace of seeing the same people and doing the same things. I felt trapped in my comfort and by the sense of familiarity that was far too easy to resent for being omnipresent. It was an underwhelming city and I couldn’t register why people would move to Denver or New York City or San Diego or Seattle and boomerang right back to their old life less than a year later.

BUT GUESS WHAT. I GET IT NOW. I MISS HOME SO MUCH AND SOME DAYS I WISH I WOULD HAVE NEVER LEFT SO I WOULD NEVER HAVE TO THINK ABOUT COMING BACK. I miss drinking on porches, finding friends at every bar and walking the line between still drunk and hungover to go get bagels in the morning. I miss the beach and the sun and cheap tacos on Mondays and Tuesdays and cheap drinks on patios between four and seven. I miss living in a city that felt accessible, even when I was tired or dirt poor. It’s hard to make friends as an adult in a major city and I miss being surrounded by people who know me well more than anything. even more than the enchiladas from my favorite restaurant.

My boyfriend shares these sentiments which has made it significantly easier to process. I’m committed to him, to staying in Portland through next summer and not much else. But on the way to brunch we had to ask ourselves/each other “okay but what if we move all over and never feel whatever we wish we were feeling here?” which scares the shit out of me. Basically I want to feel at home (hard to do without actually moving back to Virginia and subsequently feeling like I’m completely retrogressing) or I want to feel like I’m on vacation (unsustainable unless I move to Hawaii.) Living in a space where I’ve got the duty of real life like working, paying bills and putting on pants SUCKS when it’s not balanced with the comforts of really being at home. 

this all is reminiscent of when I graduated high school. I think about that time in my life often; I had a full blown existential crisis/minor depressive episode because I couldn’t fathom ever making friends again. My first year of college was ROUGH. I got through it. And then it happened again when I was twenty and a breakup pulled the rug out from under my whole life. I thought I was going to live as a recluse forever, drinking wine and sobbing in the bathtub for the rest of my life. And I rebuilt my life into something I was very proud of. And here I am again, in that lull between periods of thriving. Bored. Underwhelmed. Uncomfortable. But fully expectant of a redefinition of home and all the othergood things to come.