2019 + 2020 = IDK
2019 was a tough year for me of personal mistakes, anger, sadness, and ultimately, growth. It made me question who I was. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve discovered the answer to that yet — but honestly, do we ever? The version of ‘me’ that was so sure of my core in 2012 is no longer the person that is sitting here writing to the internet in 2019. It’s made me come to the conclusion that we are all constantly morphing into something else and it’s not always with forward momentum (I’ll get into that in a later blog post).
When I was fifteen, I viewed life like an RPG game. If I do X, then Y will happen and that will always result in Z. I imagined my character, bobbing up & down, facing a monster, when four options would appear on screen. I would assess each decision and potential outcome and move forward with the most advantageous one. Cue the unfreeze and I would vanquish the villain in my life and continue to climb upwards, in a straight line. Everything I experienced in my life supported that: I studied —> I got good grades —> I felt good about myself. I worked out —> I had quads of steel (miss you, quads) —> I looked bomb in shorts. When I leveled up (aka graduated college), X+Y no longer equaled Z and I couldn’t really decipher which decision was best for what I wanted to achieve. Instead of climbing up a ladder, all of a sudden I was faced with a sea of them and I was unsure which one to take. The straight line to success in my mind was suddenly on ‘shrooms; vibrating and telling me to go in circles and since when do lines talk?
Everything became a little muddier. There were no concrete guidelines. I was walking around with my eyes bandaged touching my way through a maze where the walls were made of cactus and the floor was lava. Ok - that’s a little dramatic, but as a 21 year old who had just graduated, couldn’t get a job (thanks recession), and had no clue how she could make a small impact on the world, I felt like my “quest” would never even begin because I couldn’t find the damned entrance.
Fast forward to almost a decade (HOLY SHIT! A DECADE), and I’ve got an incredible job being strategic & creative leading a team of wonderful people. But that itch that I’m still looking for that entrance in 2012 was still there. And like I briefly mentioned earlier, 2019 had been a year of “what the fuckness" (not to tease, but I’ll get to that in a later post). So this hodge podge of crap is going on in my life and I blink and suddenly it’s the end of 2019 and I refuse to let the ‘what the fuckness’ seep its grimey little claws into 2020. So, I created this.
Throughout the decades, I’ve always found squiggles in the visual arts. When I was in the one-digit ages, I commandeered my parents’ video camera to make artsy films. Literally all of them are of me dramatically zooming into my dad’s mustache because I thought the hair textures would make for epic transition. In high school, I took photography as an elective and got to spend hours in a dark room, smelling like vinegar. In college, I quit pre-med after two years to go study film.
Rewind: what are squiggles? That’s what I call when your heart feels weightless — it’s like butterflies, but more intense because you feel the squiggles like a chain reaction that sends signals to your mouth to smile, and your brain to perceive the world with a little bit more love. And through every stage of my life, photo & film had done that for me.
I have always been a dreamer (dididreamthat.wordpress.com). And growing up, I was taught the adage that I can be anything I want to be when I grew up. And when I grew up, I realized people just mostly stuck to one thing. Fast forward to 2019: I have an incredible job working with beautiful people where I get to be strategic and creative and I’m constantly learning something new about myself. I don’t want to leave that. But I also don’t want to leave photo & film in my past.
Here is where the POV comes in that you’re probably not going to get from most other people that do this full time. I’m not going to quit my job and I don’t expect to become an influencer. I am all about filling my life with squiggles with every opportunity, and sometimes the squiggles come from not-so-sexy jobs in front of the computer in an office. This is my path — my attempt to Da Vinci my life up — to not choose one thing because in three decades of life, I’ve refused to box myself up so why start now?
So this is me, doing it all. I found the entrance to my quest, bitches. Bring it, 2020.