Hi! Hello hello! And welcome back. I’m blogging again. Huzzah.
I haven’t blogged in a long time (maybe a year? more? yikes.). Which is weird because I love to write. I feel most like *me* when I’m writing. It’s my truest form of expression (and by ‘expression,’ I mean almost like ‘exorcism’). Putting my thoughts, feelings, reactions, whatever, out there is how I release them from my mind and soul, freeing me up. Clearing out my caves of matted down experiences that might be marinating a little too much. Until I put it all out there, I find that stuff can fester inside of me. The way I think & feel is like fermentation: a little is fabulous, but too much and the content becomes soured, feeding off itself. I gotta release it sometimes or I explode.
That said, the writing I was doing for years — my blogging — wasn’t working for me. I always think that one way of knowing that something isn’t working for you is if you just can’t bring yourself to do it. I mean, there are things you don’t necessarily want to do everyday (I dunno: brush your teeth? eat your greens? those squats?) but you know you have to because these actions increase your quality of life. I tried to make my blogging like one of those daily/weekly actions that I know was for my better good. But I dreaded it and, ultimately, in the rush of life, teeth got brushed, greens got eaten, squats got squatted; and blogging continuously fell off the to-do list.
If I’m honest with myself about it, I got frustrated by the formulaic nature of it all. Blog each shoot with fun details about the client using certain words so the content pops up in searches. Optimize it for your brand. Blah blah blah. Everyone does it so you feel like you have to, but eventually you feel like your blog looks like everyone else’s and, at some point, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing anymore. The lack of authenticity in my words and the lack of my own personality in the posts became abundantly clear to me, and maybe my way of pushing back was no longer joining the cattle call of creating these cute little photographer blog posts.
So I stopped blogging.
But in stopping blogging, I also stopped writing, and I’ve spent the past six months thinking about how much I miss writing, and realizing that I see a difference in me (a festering implosion) when I’m not expelling my thoughts/feelings/realizations/reactions on a regular basis. Yes, on the one hand, I became so completely overwhelmed with work last year that finding time to blog/write became problematic; but, on the other hand, you always need to make time for things that are important to you, and I’ve definitely accepted that writing is important to me. So, how do I make this work for myself? I’ve decided to resume blogging, but write about whatever I want. Obviously sometimes that will be shoots (I am, after all, a professional photographer, and I love my work + my clients + I want to showcase my accomplishments), but sometimes it’ll just be a story about me. And, most likely, Victor, too, since we spend 24/7 together.
I hope this works. I hope re-introducing writing into my life becomes as therapeutic as I expect it to be. I hope that sharing more of myself reminds me why I decided to craft my life into what it’s become today because sometimes I feel as though everything’s gotten away from me. And I hope my writings connect me much more deeply to people out there. When I first started my website, I wrote about Seinfield-esque nothing-ness half the time (because I didn’t have many clients or much work to blog about) and those are actually the posts I most enjoy re-reading years later. And years from now? I’ll want to look back on this time in my life and want to know how I felt, what I thought, what I did, etc, as I continued on this journey (photography, travel, marriage, Park City) that’s become my full-time life. So that’s what I’m going to write about.
Oh, and that lead photo and these next few photos? They’re from our recent trip to the United Arab Emirates. We stayed at the Qasr al Sarab resort by Anantara, out in the sand dunes near the Saudi Arabian border, and it was ridiculously gorgeous. Hopefully more on that in a later post, but, man, they upgraded us to a room with a terrace as big as our first apartment and a bathtub that would qualify as a pool; and it was awesome.
