Little Thoughts on Who I Want to Be

Some folks will escape to nature to find solitude and discover themselves. Instead of a forest, I have nestled myself into a little apartment in the Netherlands.

In this city, I have been refining all of my habits and spending time with myself. People at home say they miss me. But unbeknownst to me, I think I have missed myself longer. It’s as though I’ve had a four-month detox from my previous self who was so moulded in clay that she was gasping for air. For the last four months, I’ve picked away at all the clay to give my most inner-self air.

My deepest part of myself has missed my tribe. It’s true, as humans we are social creatures. With the tens of thousands of pictures I’ve taken, I’ve taken a comparatively amount of the people in my social circles. It feels like a gift that I can give the people around me. All of the time I spent working at events, parties, weddings, engagements, on all my weekends, working many nights has really been like a practical academy for me to refine my skill in real time.

I am curious about what new woman I will bring home. She feels more like moss, the kind of flora that sucks all of the carbon out of the air and is soft to touch instead of the dry desert clay with cracks through it that she was hiding under.

I want to have the courage to explore myself as an artist. I went for a walk this morning after a morning meditation and just spent the whole time thinking.

I used to meet different people who would tell me they used to be photographers or they are photographers with other jobs and it always befuddled me. Why would anyone want to not do this full-time? As artists, I think we go through different seasons. For me, it has felt like people didn’t take me seriously when I told them what I did (until they saw my work) so questions about how I made a living always felt a little invasive (unless they came from a place of soft and genuine curiosity).

I want to unbox myself and allow myself to be the kaleidoscopic being that I am. I want to have the courage to allow myself to explore new dimensions of myself without fear. I realised that I have spent a lot of my time checking myself. Do you know how people with OCD have those tics where they will flick the light on and off a certain amount of times before they leave a room? When I have new ideas or outrageous ideas, I will check myself to see if I’ve gone crazy. In my world when I was growing up, I had to be sensitive to the frequency and intensity of the ideas of people around me to see if they were sane. So in an odd sense, I can check myself when I have ideas to see if there are any outliers from sanity. It’s an odd thing. I want to have the courage to step into my imaginative self who dreams and allows herself to explore them in a creative sense.

These are my little thoughts.