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.
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.
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.
I trimmed back the hedges in the bed in front of our front porch this morning. Prior to trimming, they hedges were taller than the porch railing– that whole brush pile in the walkway is what I cut back. I even toted the brush pile to the street for pickup by myself!
It’s for sure becoming apparent that the state of my self-esteem can absolutely be measured by how well I am tending to my house, or how interested I am in tending to my house.
This morning, despite a late night waiting for Liam to get home, I managed to get Oliver to school, started towels (towels and sheets don’t count toward laundry day), have kept towels going all day so far. I did my morning meditation with my Calm app and did 20 minutes on my stationary bike (20 minutes instead of 30 because I haven’t done it in at least a month and a half and am really out of shape all over again).
It’s time for some serious yard attention now that it is Fall. My goal yet this afternoon is still to get out and mow a section of the yard. But this morning, I managed to trim back those bushes you see in the photo above all by myself. That’s kind of a thing because I normally leave that sort of yard work to Jared– getting me to mow or blow off the driveway is usually cause for celebration enough.
But I care about how our house looks and feels again, and the whole hedge trimming project took about 30 minutes total. I had to come in and rest after, and so here I am writing while I get up my energy to go mow, after having had a snack for lunch.
But here’s the thing: Somewhere along the way in 2010 or so, I just utterly snapped. And I have floundered at times and I have done okay at times, and I have mostly been able to be social when out in public all along.
But inside, I’ve felt defeated. I looked back on my school days both in grade school and high school and undergrad, and I did have quite a bit of academic promise. And then in my early career I had such interesting, impactful employment.
And then, I had a very public episode and, job after job, the career-type promise went away.
And I am doing my best to build back. Looking back now I can see for so many years I was grasping for instant repair.
There is no instant repair for the kinds of trauma and mood issues I’ve dealt with in my life. In fact, I’ve run away from the kinds of healing that would really help, at times.
So here I am, in late 2025, and I realize now that the next perfect job is not going to fix my heartbreak. The latest camera gear is certainly not going to fix my heart. The best thing I can do for myself is remind myself that I am capable. And there’s no better way to do that than to do what needs to be done– what I have been running from– and that is to tend to my home and family.
Aside: waking up this morning with the new sheers was amazing. I was in the bed until 7 and the light was just starting to come up, and the uniform light entering the house, growing little by little as the minutes went by, was balm for my soul. That was exactly what I needed, and I am thrilled with the effect. Letting my body work with the sun is also good for my soul and mental health.
Every day won’t be perfect. I know I have to expect depression to come back with its darkness again.
But it seems to be true: When I want to run from my house, when I want to start over, it’s not really about the house. It’s about myself.
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