Tag: Family

  • the reckoning

    It’s been a year.

    Not in the whole chronological sense….I mean, of course I am aware that in general, a year has passed in my life.

    But I mean…. it’s been quite the year, in an emotional journey sense.

    2025 has been hard.

    This has been the year of the financial reckoning. I was burned out and floundering and not doing well mental-health-wise which led me to close down the photography business. But also: the photography business was an unsustainable financial venture, and keeping it open greatly added to our debt every month.

    I’ve been through our budget time and again over the months. We’ve used YNAB for years– since 2012– and all this time, I’ve kept track of where our money goes. It’s just that most of the time, I overlooked credit card spending. I was focusing more on the emotional wants and feeling like I needed to spend both to quell the overwhelming terror and urge to figure something out professionally, but also to stuff the overwhelming sense of boredom in my life.

    And all that messiness came out in gross overspending.

    And so here I am, and it’s the last days of October, and it’s month five of actually attempting to be responsible.

    I spent a grand total of $22.39 this month on nonessential fun stuff for myself. That’s major progress. I bought a couple of skeins of yarn and some more antique resin cameos for necklaces and rings.

    It’s not enough. Not spending is not enough to clean up this mess.

    At this point, if rent were not so astronomical everywhere, if we hadn’t bought our house with a 2.875% interest rate and if the real estate landscape were not pretty atrocious right now, I’d probably be trying to figure out how to get our house on the market, to pay off our debt, because that’s probably going to be the only way out.

    Not an option at the moment. We couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

    We need more income. I need a job.

    And I’ve sent out tons of applications. I had an interesting offer last week, but the whole operation reeked of shady, and I’ve learned that I have a pretty stellar intuition about people so I said no. It was interesting not in the “this would be a fun job” sense but in the “I’m not sure this is a legal operation” sense.

    At the same time as the financial reckoning, I’ve been seriously working on my mental and emotional health.

    I’ve been facing some long demons head-on.

    It’s not been easy. Progress is not linear.

    I went to bed afraid of someone last night and didn’t sleep well, waking up unable to go back to sleep at 3:45 AM this morning which is why I am drafting this post at 5:30 AM.

    That’s just my life.

    Jared and I have been talking about the what-ifs of life lately.

    Like, what if I ever had to live in this house on my own, without him.

    And Jared is not sure I could do it, because I am so fearful.

    And he’s right– I like to think I wouldn’t have to leave the house to go live with family or someone else, but I don’t even like to turn out the lights in the house for the night by myself.

    My fear is that intense, and it’s always worse at night than during the daytime.

    In the daytime, it’s manageable.

    But at least this morning, I can cry, which is progress.

    Because there are times that I’m so emotionally numb– most of the time, actually– that the tears don’t come.

    And while trying to clean up the financial front of life, I’ve also been attempting to dissect, at the most very basics of levels, the trauma bonds that have kept me in bondage for most of my adult life, since last December.

    It’s been messy, and honestly it’s been a miracle at times that I haven’t landed in a psych ward. That’s all I really care to say about it.

    Except and this morning, I am angry, and I feel hurt, and slightly stupid, and I want retribution that will never come.

    But, I do know this: Karma is a bitch.

    So, I bide my time. And heal what I can, as I can.

  • the search

    The Marina this morning

    Once upon a time, there was a girl who was out looking for herself.

    She looked everywhere. She looked back in time.

    She looked in her hometown.

    She looked in far off places.

    And there was a boy who held her hand the whole time.

    And he reminded her that she was enough, that she mattered.

    And he reminded her, daily, that he loved her.

    And, one evening, holding the boy’s hand at the Marina in the picture above, she briefly snapped out of her fragile venture for meaning to see that it was right there, with her, holding her hand, the whole time.

  • baby steps

    My eating has been trash lately.

    Last night, for example: lots of shredded cheese, some shredded cheese melted on top of Cheez-its. A can of Sprite for the first time in years.

    Night before last: a container of Rebel ice cream.

    For three days in a row, the last night ending with the ice cream night: Beecher’s Mac and Cheese from Costco…. the package said it served 6-9. I ate it in three equal portions over three nights.

    Sometime in that mix, I ate hearty portions of the sour gummies Oliver wanted at Trader Joe’s.

    The days start out okay. Most mornings lately I have been having walnuts and almond flour crackers for breakfast. Occasionally I have a protein bar with them; I am trying to cut back on the protein bars.

    About midday I make my Dunkin’ Decaf coffee, and put in my Anthony’s Marine Collagen in it. And I nurse it for the rest of the day in a Thermos tumbler.

    I had tried to cut out cheese and most processed foods except for the almond flour crackers.

    However, bananas apparently make me sick — I am repeatedly nauseous when adding a banana to my banana/ wild blueberries/ spinach/ almond milk smoothie.

    And so I gave up on the smoothies for several days. I will probably try one again today.

    And I haven’t made egg whites as a meal in several days, either.

    But, despite last night’s junk food, I woke up ready to face the day today.

    I didn’t make it to my church ladies’ group because Liam had a haircut in Sandy Springs with Finch at Aura Salon and I let Jared take him, and stayed home with Oliver instead. While Oliver can stay home for short periods on his own, leaving town with neither of us in town is not a good idea, obviously. Even if I could have called Mama and Daddy to be on standby.

    And honestly, I also needed to sleep in. I slept until 10:39 this morning.

    We’ve got projects I’d intended to get done around the house for Fall Break.

    The bushes need trimming back dramatically, and I have film to coat the windows in to provide more insulation, and I have 4 more sets of sheers to iron and put up because we really need one more panel on each of the 8 windows around the house.

    And we bought an actual old-school mop at Walmart this past weekend, intending to actually clean the floors really, really well since dog pee and poop has become a regular thing (it’s not their fault we can’t keep up since they are getting older, and sometimes they miss the puppy pads).

    But I have been in avoidance mode for reasons I’m not yet ready to talk about. Maybe next week.

    I’ve let the stress of anticipation get in the way of self-care, and all that.

    But today: Today it is 1:44 PM as I write this and I have done my light therapy. I made my gratitude list. I listened to this week’s “The Next Right Thing” with Emily P. Freeman as I did two of my physical therapy exercises.

    I did two of my physical therapy exercises for the first time in weeks.

    Jared wants to go on a walk.

    And my only house goal today is to iron those sheers and get them up. That is not a hard task.

    Baby steps.

    You can read more about me here.

  • the crash

    One of the feet of my grandparents’ 1940s couch…the couch lives in our bedroom now, but this photo was taken as part of a series I did several years ago called One Hundred Sixteen.

    Yeah.

    I’ve given up cheese and bread and most processed foods. Most of the things I’ve survived on for the 46 years of my life.

    So it stands to reason that when I get hungry, and let too much time go between meals, I’d get a little despondent.

    Several years ago, probably in 2016 or so, I thought I was dying. I’d had radioactive iodine ablation therapy on my thyroid the year before, and my thyroid levels were not leveling out as they should have. And my calcium levels were high, and I felt terrible, and my endocrinologist was not sure there wasn’t something screwy going on with my pituitary gland….

    And I took several of the photos I’d taken in the five years’ prior, and converted them all to black and white and made them into square formats, and made a photo book out of them, and called the project One Hundred Sixteen, related to our address at the time. And I had Ilford silver gelatin prints made of all the photos in the book…..I wanted my husband and kids to have the best of what I had done with the previous five years, in photos, things that my eye had captured over the years.

    The photo above is one of those photos included in the book and prints.

    And that is how we came to have a crap ton of silver gelatin prints of my early work around the house, and even more live in a drawer in our dining room now, just taking up space.

    I don’t have the exif data from that file above, since it’s so heavily altered. But if I had to guess, I took that photo above with a Fuji X-T2 and probably the 56mm f1.2 lens or the 35mm f2 lens. Around that time period all I would have had was the 16mm, the 56mm, the 35mm f2, and the 90mm, all Fuji X Series native lenses. It was for sure either the Fuji X-T2 or the Fuji X-Pro 2 camera.

    I laid down for a nap earlier this afternoon because I was tired, and when I woke up I was in an awful, teary state.

    I sold off 4 GFX lenses and the second GFX 50sII body this summer, and now I deeply regret it.

    If I had the second body, I could go around with both Cinelux lenses on.

    If I had the 45-100mm and the 100-200mm lenses, I could better do wildlife photography.

    But at the time, I had things I wanted to do and we sort of needed the money and well…. so they went.

    And so my meltdown earlier today was about that, and was also about the fact that while nobody paying me doesn’t mean I’m not a photographer, I also realized what I have given up in closing down my business. Even if it cost massive amounts of money I never made with it.

    I miss people asking me to take pictures of things, and I miss even more having the gear I had to be able to do so.

    Now, arguably, the X-S20 is better for some of that than the GFX gear.

    But once you have shot with a medium format camera….it’s hard to go back.

    It’s sort of like people who have to downgrade lifestyle stuff.

    And I have worked hard these past couple of weeks. Our house isn’t perfectly clean but it is better. The window coverings situation is certainly better, having a dedicated laundry day is better, Nancy is better, having the garage emptied out feels better…..

    Having the garage empty means I can get back to my studio selfies. I should plan to do that in the next couple of days.

    But then I got through with my pity party enough to go make myself my smoothie– almond milk, wild blueberries, spinach powder, and a banana– and two sips into my smoothie it hit me:

    I was despondent because I was hungry.

    HA.

    Y’all, I am so used to processed foods and cheese and all the yummy goodness. But the things I am eating (today’s breakfast was late and it was almond flour crackers, decaf coffee with marine collagen, and walnut pieces, and I did allow myself a protein bar this morning)….. they metabolize faster. And take more preparation than just grabbing a string cheese and a protein bar, or some goat cheese and sunflower seeds……

    *sigh*

    I do feel better. I went to bed not depressed last night. It was nice to just know it was time to go to bed and not feel like the world was ending, or like someone was out to get me, a frequent feeling late at night.

    And there is personal drama I don’t care to go into going on, both for me and for Jared, and there’s just a lot going on.

    And I don’t feel particularly inspired to pick up my cameras, even if I pine away over gear I parted with.

    It all feels manufactured and pointless. Jared takes me to the Marina and I sit there with the camera in my hand and remember, not even really seeing what is in front of me.

    And honestly, the sunrise photos at the Marina and the duck pictures in the evening are boring at this point.

    It’s time for a personal project. And a reckoning.