This isn't a problem to solve

Right now, everything feels a little quiet for me. Not “stuck” necessarily, just quiet.

You probably know the difference. And you probably also know how hard the system works to convince you that those are the same thing.

Behind the scenes, I’m excavating. Not necessarily building something new, but unearthing things that were always there and asking: what stories am I carrying that were never mine to begin with?

What does the person I most want to reach actually need, and how does everything I’ve lived, the photography, the grief, the teaching, the obsession with who gets to hold the frame, how does all of that actually serve them?

There’s no neutral frame. Every image is a decision. The story you believe about yourself depends entirely on who’s telling it.

I’ve been saying these things for years.

Right now I’m doing the slower, less visible work of letting them reshape everything.

This is what Alexi Pappas calls the “glop stage”. The caterpillar fully dissolved, and the butterfly was not yet formed. Just glop.

I know I can’t logic my way through it, and yet I am constantly battling that with myself.

I just have to stay and let the glop, glop.

The book is doing what the best creative work does: pulling up things I didn’t know I still carried. Stories from my teens and twenties. Grief that I thought I’d tended to but haven’t. Dots are connecting in ways I didn’t plan, and the thesis is becoming something I didn’t fully anticipate, which means it’s becoming true.

Paid photography work is slower right now, and from what I’ve heard from others in my world, that’s true across the board, and also true by design. I’ve been deliberately widening what I offer, and I appreciate that creates a gap (but it’s still uncomfortable).

I’m straddling what feels like two worlds: existing in spaces that have only ever known me as a photographer, and new spaces that only know me as a speaker. It probably looks less uncomfortable from the outside than it feels. 👀

This is not a pivot away from the craft. Photography has been my core act of self-expression since I was a kid. It’s how I think, how I see, how I connect with strangers, perspectives, and ideas that shape who we are. What’s shifting is how I’m sharing more of what I actually have to say and how I can help people shift their own perspectives.

The one that shows up exactly when things get quieter.

“Do more. Sell more. Prove it faster.”

That voice is an inherited story, handed down by a culture that commodifies creative work and calls exhaustion a virtue.

I bet you know it. I bet you’ve been fighting it longer than you’d like to admit.

Lately, I’ve been finding peace in the mundane. A short walk in nature. A book that cracks something new open. The moment an idea I’ve carried for years suddenly connects to another one, and I understand something I didn’t before. Nobody’s watching those moments.

What I’m trusting without proof: that all of it, the photography, the grief, the teaching, the obsession with human connection, is converging into something. That choosing the slower, truer path over the louder, faster one isn’t a compromise, it’s the whole point.

It always has for me, through every shift and transformation.

But only if you don’t abandon it before it’s ready.