I Gave Up

I gave up. I gave up on myself and my photography because I didn’t think I was good enough. I didn’t believe my thoughts and vision were worth curating. In this noisy, chaotic world I simply felt that my opinion didn’t matter.

I still have my doubts, but that doesn’t hurt as much anymore. I came to the conclusion that I am a thinker and a writer and that I write not for recognition, but because I have to. My thoughts ramble a million miles a minute and I do myself a disservice by not slowing down enough to listen to myself and contemplate. This deficit was also symptomatic of the larger aforementioned issue. Where I believed that my opinion and thoughts did not matter. Sure they are ephemeral & conditional but they are no less valid than anyone else’s. At the darkest part of my myopia I even used AI to write for me briefly, telling myself that my ideas were not important enough for me to take the time to curate them and wordsmith them myself.

Meanwhile, this was the driest, hottest winter on record. As a result the phenology was all kinds of messed up this spring & summer and the the usual things we count the seasons by were late or early. Some plants bloomed in January, but then died in a freak snow storm a week later. Bees & butterflys cascaded through barren habitat in february, no nectar to be had. Birds came looking for insects in May, when many of them were killed off by another intermittent storm. I have barely seen any native bees all season.

Other current events also weigh heavily; public land mismanagement, ESA rollbacks, and just the general hatred between both sides of the aisle. However the point of this is to not bring you down, hang in there, there is a positive twist!

Why I’m back

My careless rebranding of this substack page a year ago, assumed that I would be happy with the limitation of writing about rewilding the suburbs. However, the more I wrote the more I felt like an imposter. I thought I was just done, but I am not. I want to share my thoughts about nature and mankind.

I’ve never been great about niching down. Even in my past career as a Video Game music composer, I was my happiest when I wasn’t writing the same style of music day in and day out. So a curated substack with limitations will probably not work for me. I want to write about what I experience and care about at the moment from a nature and environmental perspective.

I want people to know that they aren’t the only ones freaked out about climate change and the current anti-enviromental trend we are living in. I want to share joy and wonder that can still be found in our nature, not only for the reader, but for my sanity as well.

When you quit, the only person who loses is yourself, or so I used to think. However inspiration is a two way street. Words from others minds have pulled me out of a bad week more than once. By quitting, I wasn’t just failing myself. I was quietly taking myself out of that two-way inspirational exchange for everyone else too.

Summer has been absurdly hot, but by some great blessing we have been getting monsoon rains. Even though we are in a desperate drought, the green of the wild grass somehow lingers on, barely. Birds are busy raising fledglings and getting ready for their mighty commute back south. I actually saw a small little native bee this morning on a blue-bell bloom.

I hope it snows alot this winter.