middle keeps teaching me
When you slow down and get quiet, does your heart have a message for you?
This is a prompt gifted to us in a weekly writer’s club meet up I participate in as dedicated time to writing pieces like this.
I don’t usually use the prompts.
I showed up in with my own arc already running, something I’m already chasing for this article, and most weeks I nod at his question and go write mine anyway. This time I let mine go and followed his instead.
But this prompt hit different. Darius, the facilitator, opened by asking what love is and the room didn’t disappoint. They answered back with everything from pineapple to music to ice cream to infinite.
My answer was, us. And I was immediately reminded of the ways love show up and I get to capture in my photographs.
He, then, led us into a guided meditation the way he always does, and somewhere in it he said, “The story is already inside us, waiting in the portal of the heart.”
I felt it. This is what I want my writings to be: the place where I actually slow down enough to hear what’s underneath whatever I’ve already decided to write about that week, instead of a report on what I’ve built or a takeaway wrapped in a bow.
It’s the same instinct I have behind the camera, catching the moment before someone knows I’ve caught it, the turn between what was happening and what’s about to happen.
I want to write from there, not from the version of me that already has it figured out. And I too often get confused or off track.
That prompt brought me back
Love is the thing I’ve been photographing my whole career. It’s obvious in the newly engaged couple, in the grandmother who can’t stop looking at her grandbaby. It’s just as present in the commercial shoots, the company that loves what it built so much it wants pictures that finally look like them. I’ve spent over twenty years pointing a camera at people loving something, and somewhere in that I stopped noticing it was the actual subject.
And here’s the harder part my heart wanted to say. I can get so wrapped up in the structure, the SOP, the system that’s supposed to hold everything together, that I forget
the thing I actually love is the middle.
The in-between, where a family doesn’t know I’ve caught them yet, where something is turning from what it was into what it’s about to be. That’s what I chase behind the camera, and I want to chase it here too, in these words, before I edit myself into something smoother and safer.
I’m writing this before I leave for Greece. By the time you’re reading it, I’ll already be there, on what’s actually a true sabbatical, two weeks, the longest break I’ve ever let myself take.
Before I could get to a place where two weeks away felt possible
I had to live through the years where I had no process at all. When I first started shooting, I didn’t know how to get pictures out of the camera and into a client’s hands in a way that made sense. I couldn’t always find an image again when someone needed a reprint. I didn’t know how to talk to my team so nothing got lost. Every time something went wrong after I’d tried something new, it felt like defeat, and that defeat built its own kind of anxiety, the fear that trying something different again would just lead back to the same feeling. We’re taught to try, try again, like it’s simple, but that glazes over how much of our heart goes into the thing that failed, and how we’re just supposed to set it down and move on, especially when it’s your career, when your stability depends on getting it right. That’s worth its own conversation another day. But it’s part of what anxiety and defeat actually feel like when you’re navigating uncertainty, and it’s a piece of the process that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. I tried tool after tool anyway, rebuilt the process more times than I can count, and every bit of that frustration was doing something. It was showing me exactly where the flow needed to change. That’s the only reason this break felt possible this time instead of impossible.
Because here’s what’s true. In the six days before I left, I had five assignments and I got every one of them processed and handed off, clean, with room to spare before I packed a bag. I wasn’t anxious about it. I want to remember that, because there were years when leaving for anything felt like abandoning a ship that was already taking on water. All that old anxiety, all the times I couldn’t find a photo when I needed it, all the frustration building a process my team could actually follow, none of that was wasted. It’s the reason this time felt different.
But photography isn’t the only system I brought into this trip. Content creating and scheduling is the newest part of what I’m building, and I’m still very much figuring it out. I told a friend at dinner the other night that even though getting content scheduled wasn’t going so well, I wasn’t anxious about any of it. Decisions about what to post and when are taking a lot longer than I’d like. I’m making choices I probably wouldn’t make the same way twice, and redoing pieces of it, because I’ve never tried to keep this running while I was fully gone before. The old me, four years into building and rebuilding Thriv, would have called all of that a pain in my ass. This time I’m staying grounded, actually curious.
What is this teaching me?
What’s coming from it?
Where is this going?
I know that because it’s how it went when I was figuring out my efficiency and flow early in my photography career too. I release the anxiety so I can hear the information instead.
I’m not mad at myself about any of it anymore. That might be the actual message.
I don’t have to have the system solved
to trust that I’m building the right one.
The love I keep photographing in other people, the ease, the devotion, the not-performing, is available to me too, in how I let this get built. It’s the way that feels like being in love with myself while I do it, not the way I’m supposed to do it.
I don’t need Greece to hand me inspiration.
I need it to hand me back myself.
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