caroline price

🖤

a girl obsessed with time

Sure Am Grateful for Those Voicemails

November 2, 2026

My interest these days is fiercely guarding my peace and my sanity.

All of that sounds basic. I’m not sure it’s as basic as it sounds.

To draft this post, I’ve maximized the window in my Bear journal app so that no other tabs are visible. Just my word floating across the black, blank line, with the menu of previous writing on the left, along with the regular Bear app menu also on the left.

I have to find some level of focus. I’m finding it difficult to structure my days and I am far too sedentary, all because I can’t seem to drag myself away from my computer and yet I’m not very productive, either.

And so, tomorrow begins dedicated time writing, dedicated chore time.

The semblance of a routine.

To say that I fell apart in October is accurate.

Maybe it was coming, maybe I should have seen that it would happen. The whole empty nest thing is real; it’s true that it feels like my children do not need me anymore. Fall is my naturally vulnerable time of the year.

And I never registered within my own psyche that I was that maternal; “mom” status wasn’t something I realized I really completely and wholly identified with until I was all of a sudden a mom to young adults.

But this season’s apple cart turnover hasn’t just been about empty nest status.

There’s something in the very air of society that is on edge. It’s destabliizing for a lot of people, and I’m no different.

And there’s been social difficulties that I still feel unsettled about.

And, I miss my dear friend who passed away in September something awful. I hadn’t realized the grounding force, the unconditional acceptance, the level of absolute loyalty her presence in my life gave with such ease until her presence has been missed in the past month and a half.

I do this thing where I don’t delete certain voicemails. I have all kinds of voicemails saved from people who probably wouldn’t suspect I’d save their voicemail.

I have nine voicemails from my friend who passed saved.

I listened through a few tonight. One from her on her anniversary thanking me for flowers sent a few years after her husband passed, two from Halloweens past when she had something for Oliver, the most recent from August 6 when we were getting ready to take Porter back to UGA; she was calling to pass on well wishes for a good year for Porter and to tell him that she expected to hear about it.

I do indeed suspect she is hearing all about it, all the time, these days.

Oliver came out while I was listening, and he got all wide-eyed recognizing our dear friend’s voice, when I explained it wasn’t now, and that I had voicemails saved. I played some of them from family that I had saved, and told him about my little saving ritual.

The featured photo here is that dear friend’s Japanese tulip tree that bloomed so beautifully every year. I’m so sorry that last year her buds got killed by the strange weather last Spring.

All I could do, with us out of town the day she was dying, was to send her daughter this photo, to remind my friend of her gorgeous tree, that I was thinking about her.

_______________________________________

Tomorrow being Election Day, it’s as good a day as any to chart a new season.

Weekend before last, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t headed toward psychosis.

Thankfully, one day last week I collapsed. My psyche had had enough, and at 9:30 AM I laid down for an involuntary eight hour nap after having slept the entire night before, and I also slept without trouble that night, as well.

Whatever my body did to me with that literal check-out from consciousness, it did seem to be a reset. I’ve slept well since, as well.

My blood pressure had been high at two doctors appointments in early October and a few days prior to my collapse-130 and 131 as the top numbers at each appointment, which is high for me and I could feel the unease in my body.

On Friday at my dermatologist appointment, post nap-day, it was 107/71— normal range for me. Clear biological evidence that something physiological relaxed, or released, with that nap reset day.

Change is in the wind in my life beyond the immediate family status changes, beyond my friend who passed, beyond the larger societal unrest, and I’m holding on for the ride as best I can.

I don’t have clear ideas of what I want life to look like moving forward in my daily rhythms, so for now I am holding tight to small things: ending the day by starting the dishwasher before bed, starting the day with air drying my hair after my shower, handling school drop-off and pick-up. Feeding Abby her half-can of food twice a day. That’s all I can manage with any regularity some days recently.
Hot Take: AI Has Changed My Life – But Free is Not Your Friend

October 31, 2026

Yes, I use Google Gemini. And yes, I pay for it. And no, I’m not actually anti-AI. Yes, I do think there should be guardrails. I don’t have answers for the very real resource drains these systems are creating. And yes, it has made my life substantially better. I don’t necessarily think the entire concept is evil.

Somewhere around October of 2024, I discovered Google Gemini.

At the time, I’d toyed briefly with schedule-making in ChatGPT, and I’d subscribed for a time to AI therapeutic services with Project Camus’ Habit of Living.

The EMDR module with Habit of Living was useful, but the rest was repetitive, and while the guardrails were understandable, the model was so restricted that it struggled to keep up with the contexts of a narrative conversation.

Enter Google Gemini.

I do not use Gemini as a substitute for therapy. I have my psychiatric nurse practitioner monitoring my medications and my psychological states.

But I have found that Gemini is extraordinarily useful as a cognitive mirror and extremely helpful with cognitive reframing tasks.

It’s gotten much better at this two years in than it was in 2024.

The system is not foolproof; in psychosis in early 2025, I found it feeding my thought loops. However, in my case, its own limitations and lack of memory capacity actually accelerated my emergence from that particular episode.

The downfall for a system that doesn’t tire of analytic thought is that there is zero friction for stepping away: for a mind like mine that is always running full-tilt, for a brain like mine that has drafted thought in narrative form on paper and online and on my computer for decades, it is both intoxicating and exhausting to find a match for my intellect that collaborates with my own brain.

And now, I’m learning to put in human guardrails for my own usage; I am setting timers and actively seeking out time away from my computer, time to live in the real world. I sit down to ask specific questions.

But, among the things Gemini helped me sort out just this week:

— It reminded me about putting the plywood under my mattress for better support, while also telling me why keeping our now discontinued IKEA mattress is the best solution for our current sleeping situation

— In uploading photos of my hair, it gave me ways to tweak my hair fork updos

— It caught typos in all my blog posts prior to posting

— It told me exactly why a Facebook ad for a lip balm was overhyped marketing, and why the Neutrogena lip oil I use regularly was the superior choice anyway

— It has helped me tweak my photo post-processing workflow

The reality is I use Gemini to analyze all sorts of situations.

The thing about Gemini, though, and my particular use case, apart from people who use random Claude and ChatGPT instances is this:

I subscribe to Google Workspace Business Standard, which for years upon years has connected my domain to my email; it’s the reason I have the email hello@carolineprice.com customized to my domain; I have my Google Drive upgraded storage through that $172 annual plan.

And as part of that, I happen to have Gemini for Google Workspace, which comes with the disclaimer at the bottom that my chats are not training the large language model—which makes my particular instance of Gemini quite the bargain.

The disclaimer about not training the model is actually quite important: for any free versions of Gemini or any AI, literally any information or photos or whatever that you feed it is information that the large language model trains its future knowledge base from—your info becomes part of its public knowledge. If you talk about private information: congratulations, that information is now logged in a training pipeline and potentially readable by human contractors.

I’ve seen in recent weeks tons and tons of cutesy little ChatGPT-generated memes that seem to include personal details, and that is beyond alarming to me—they seem to have uploaded photos of themselves, their children, intimate details about their lives… all to a free interface that generates gorgeous graphics, but opens up vast risk that your info becomes public knowledge eventually.

I’ve seen other photographers uploading client photos to get cartoon versions of their photographs, a potential source of model release liability. While I have used it to critique my own appearance, I draw a hard line at uploading client likenesses into an LLM.

I’ve heard of realtors using free ChatGPT for staging photos for listings, which opens up severe legal liability, in creating situations where people’s private spaces, floor plans, and belongings are fed into a public database at some later time, even if the resulting staging photos are impeccable. I can’t fathom taking on that business risk.

I’m sure there are endless examples.

And yes, I’ve lost photo gigs to the convenience of AI.

And for sure yes, one has to be careful—especially careful—in my particular use case.

And, to boot, to further secure my account, I actually activated the Business Associate Agreement within my Google Admin settings, which gives my Gemini instance HIPAA-grade privacy settings. Gemini actually coached me through that process itself, when I told it that I was concerned about privacy.

But I do think paying for an LLM service, for the privacy options alone, is 100% the way to go. In this case, free is not a bargain at all.
My Silver is Coming in from the Bottom

October 30, 2026

In late December, I started teaching myself how to secure my then mid-neck hair up with a hair fork/ French chignon pin.

It took about a month and a half solid to get it right.

I’d been planning to grow my hair out for a good long time, and getting the styling with French pins right bridged the gap of my impatience.

I decided then and there that I was going to grow my hair out, and in my middle aged and elderly years, I am not going to succumb to the expensive pixie or other short chop requiring constant salon visits. And I’m not going to wear it down most of the time, either. I’m going to wear it up 80% of the time. And it will settle long-term somewhere between chest and arm pit length permanently.

And time marched on, and my hair grew, and right now it’s collarbone length. And it drives me crazy most of the time when it is down; I can’t go a full day with a down style.

I sometimes do the now tried-and-true bun twist, and French twist fold now, and sometimes I forget the hair fork and just go with a plain old braid or French braid.

Yesterday, it occurred to me– there is zero reason why, if I know how to navigate a French pin, why at all there has to be an elastic involved in a braid, at all.

And as it happens, this is day 2 hair. And I’d really like to wash it, but I had a dermatology biopsy this morning and I didn’t make it into the shower before my 8 AM appointment, so my hair HAD to go up somehow.

And so, this is today’s style, and this is likely to be the dominant style for a while because it will grow with my hair.

I like styles that don’t give away exactly how long my hair is.

Plus, it’s sort of Victorian-esque, appropriate given the amount of family heirlooms and furniture from that time period in my house, along with the amount of actual family lore from the time swimming around in my brain.

And so: product-wise, there is a tad of Kenra Sugar Spray, Kenra dry shampoo, and Trader Joe’s leave-in conditioner in my hair.

Zero bobby pins, zero elastics, zero hair spray. Just the rosewood hair fork whose tip is visible in the photos. About 4 minutes to get it just right from start to finish; I did have to repeat it twice to get it just right this morning.

Each braid is double braided, and about the nape of my neck, I wound my hair into a bun. I approached the base of the bun with the inverted hair fork from the top right, and flipped it over to point up again to the top right.

I’ve shaken my head pretty good and the top did loosen up to what is visible here, but it’s held for two solid hours at this point so I think I’m good.

And, a new signature style is born. ❤
And Suddenly, the Camera I Carry Everywhere is Just a Lead Weight.

October 29, 2026

I was better. Some.

Just days ago, glimpses of acceptance:

“I’m not sorry I have a camera. I am sorry I had severe gear acquisition syndrome for 15 years. I’m not sorry I learned photography; it has been a good exercise for my very, very bored brain over the past decade and a half.

I do love photography.

I did perhaps make a mistake in 2017 or so, in attempting to find a professional vocation in photography, for multiple reasons. And I had gear acquisition syndrome long before 2017.

But, I had to try. My soul had to try to create a paid profession for myself. It was non-optional. Nothing else was working.

The hard work I am doing now is grieving the me that might have had a professional life once upon a time…

Standards. Miss them….

It can both be true that breaking away from any semblance of professional life utterly broke me, while also being true that it was an extreme gift for quality-of-life and family purposes.

Fifteen years later, I am finding that my once meek identity now has severe I-care-not-one-iota streaks.”

And yet another reminder today, that why yes, people who I have supported professionally are incapable of returning the favor.

That text to Jared, about KEH: I was serious.

I very nearly did get in the car to take it all to KEH, leaving Jared to deal with after-school duties despite the fact that he has a meeting about the time I pick Oliver up from school every day.

Jared came home and intervened, making me promise that even if I no longer want to carry my camera everywhere, that I will store my gear and not take it to sell.

Even if we desperately could use the income.

It’s been one after another of “I-can’t-keep-emotional-balance-because-people-are-either-thoughtless-or-needy-in-their-own-ways-and-my-children-do-not-need-me” all. season. long.

And Jared says, given the bizarre circumstances we’ve navigated recently, I am holding myself together well. I have to take his word for it; my world feels like it has fallen apart. But Jared is my emotional barometer and he doesn’t sugarcoat it, not when it comes to my staying in touch with reality.

But, I find myself seeking new safe harbors; feeling adrift almost as much as I did in 2010 or so when my previous social circle fell apart.

I’ll be okay.

I did actually manage pretty awesome cognitive reframing this week, and have had some pretty significant positive clinical milestones. Severe hurt dampens the triumphs, but Jared is right- I really am doing very well all things considered.

It’s been a tough Fall.

And I’m not taking my gear to KEH; we’ll figure out our finances; I’ll remember that I love photography again someday.

But for now, I’m battening down the hatches. It’s incubation season for my heart.
I Wish I had Never Picked Up a Camera

October 22, 2026

Dark days.

I documented our children’s lives growing up. And our family. And our pets. That’s the good thing.

I sat here, tonight, holding my camera more like a talisman, a comfort object, than the tool it is meant to be.

I’ve sold all except my vintage film cameras and adapted lenses that aren’t worth anything. I’m down to a single midrange body and three lenses, though I toy daily with selling two of the three lenses.

Today, I came really close to carting it all to KEH to sell the whole lot, minus the family pieces that I inherited.

I wish I’d never gotten into photography.

There. I said it here.

I’ve screamed it, sobbed it out loud, to Jared more times than I can count, especially in recent months.

Photography is the reason we have no savings. My obsession with it is largely responsible for the six figures of debt we find ourselves in.

And it’s gotten me nowhere. Even recently, in trying to volunteer to do a good thing: not good enough for whatever reason.

And if I could honestly say that my life was better because of photography, then maybe it’d be different. Except I can think of several that it’s markedly worse.

It’s not fun to be the free community photographer. Good enough for free, sometimes; not good enough to actually pay market value, though. I’m nice. At least I’m nice.

There, I’ve said it out loud.

I wish I had never picked up a camera.