There’s a voice inside of me that keeps asking, what is the point?
It says stay in your lane. Write about taking photos. Show the work you’ve made for other people. Share their stories; yours don’t matter. Make something educational. Compose a how-to. Stuff it with keywords so the search engines can find you. Pick something, anything, and only write about that.
Is there value in all of that? Of course. Except that was never the goal of this project.
When I started sharing compost, it was supposed to be easy and a place to put ideas and photos. Pull things out of morning pages to write about. It was supposed to be an instagram replacement, a way for me to own my work instead of feeding the content machine, to host it in my own space and play by my own rules.
Playing by my own rules is the part that stuck.
What I didn’t expect to happen was for it to be healing for me.
All of the advice for writing as a business tool is to write what other people want, what other people are looking for, to serve your audience, to share if it helps even one other person. Above all, always be thinking about your audience.
Sometimes I think I burned out of wedding photography because I didn’t know where I fit into my business. The roadmap for a successful business was to serve your clients, know their needs, make them feel loved and special and cared for. And I don’t doubt that’s true; it worked. Except that I completely lost myself by putting the spotlight on everyone else, which is a convenient way of avoiding looking too hard at yourself.
There’s so much that I’ve internalized about speaking up and sharing parts of myself. The family stories about not sharing the truth, spoken and unspoken prohibitions on sharing at all – there are just things you don’t put on the internet, and it’s better not to bring attention to yourself, because if you do, it can be used against you. Being conditioned as a female taught me that my value in the world is giving and self-promotion isn’t becoming but if you do good work or if your need is worthy enough, people will notice and reward you for it, no asking or vulnerability required.
Over the past year, I’ve craved books and people that feel like cheerleaders, that are reminders that making art and living life aren’t people-pleasing practices. Cynicism feels easy to fall into here, but I’m not ready to give up the idea that my art can serve my needs at the same time I provide something of value to the people I get to work with or who buy what I’m making. The ideas that I am allowed to direct what I offer for sale (instead of an industry telling me what to sell), have permission to share my stories, and make what no one is asking for because I trust that my body wants to share it for some reason, have been life rafts in a sea of voices that would like me to just follow the path that everyone else seems to have walked with ease, but my body rejects at every turn.
Anxiety, the asshole voice in my head, says I’m supposed to know what the compost wants to be. I’m supposed to know what photos I want to make to attract the people who want the same thing. I’m supposed to write about one topic and stick to it.
The point of everything I’m trying to make is that it wants to begin in my imagination and with present attention – not so much on Pinterest or looking for trends or seeing what anyone else is doing. My imagination is my greatest healer and ally. I can’t pretend anymore that I haven’t lived through some traumatic experiences, and making art from the ideas my imagination shows me is part of the process of healing. What I make is self-ish, because I am the one making it. Making art is inherently rooted in self, and I want to feel the power and freedom in that rather than the shame.
I suppose if I have a message at all, one that I’m trying to get out into the world, it’s that we all have permission to let go of the voices that tell us how things are supposed to be and instead trust ourselves, or at least start learning to. Sharing my own story does not come from a lack of caring or curiosity for other people, but an an appreciation for how it becomes a mirror, allowing both me as the writer and another person as the reader to both feel seen. I’m not writing my stories to heal anyone other than myself, but they can also serve as a reflector, letting resonance make space for wanting what we want and feeling what we feel. Personally, I’ve found so much healing in reading other people’s stories of overcoming their wounds and traumas. And it is far more healing and regenerative than I ever realized to share my own.
Allowing yourself to be seen is a way of knowing that you’re real. It’s a type of validation and acceptance and approval – because to speak your story out loud requires a level of trust in yourself. It’s an act of integrity, allowing your insides to match your outsides. For so long, my insides have been something I didn’t allow many other people to see, a part of myself I was too scared to give to the rest of the world, and that made my exterior feel like a facade. And that’s the power of using art as a healing practice, a way of letting yourself be seen – it’s a process of integrating all of the parts of you, finding a way to be whole.