As this is the place I’ve decided to share most of my secrets and things that feel hard to talk about – or at least that I’ve avidly avoided talking about – this feels like a great time to talk about failure.
It feels worthy to note that I got really lucky that my first attempt at making money from taking photos actually worked. Weddings were relatively easy to find clients for, because the cultural and systemic expectation is that this is THE event of your life that needs to be photographed and remembered. In other words, I found the thing that pretty much sold itself. It helped that I lived and breathed weddings for most of my 20s – I was passionate about them until I wasn’t, until I wanted to move on but felt trapped in the system I’d built for myself. We moved across the country around the same time that I was really feeling burned out and disillusioned, which made it a convenient time to wrap up that era of my life.
In so many ways, especially outwardly, that version of my business would have been considered a success. And don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for so much of it – the people I got to work with, the opportunities it opened up, some of them literal dreams. But I think we get success wrong sometimes. Like judging the success of a marriage by how many years it’s lasted instead of how much it taught you or helped you grow or how healthy you were while you were in it, I thought my business was successful based on the number of weddings I shot every year and getting some of them featured on magazine covers. I followed the steps that were laid out for me and that kept me from having to do the difficult inner work. I didn’t have to learn how to actually sell or market something that no one was asking for, that I made because it came from deep within me. I didn’t have to learn how to share the real parts of myself because my photos did most of the heavy lifting of telling other people’s stories. I didn’t have to unlearn people-pleasing or overworking or putting my worth in my work – and those were the parts that ended up being why I had to walk away.
After moving, I took a detour into refinishing vintage furniture (skills I now really love having, but mostly for myself), and then another detour into real estate photography, all while trying to figure out what I could actually do to make money. Those jobs kept my business treading water financially, but because I still hadn’t done all of the unlearning yet, they too kept me feeling burned out. Honestly, I took both of those jobs to fund what I really wanted to make – a collection of work that I could sell as prints. And I launched the Cheerful Print Shop in 2020, with plans to make new work for it, right before the world completely changed.
As convenient as it would be, I can’t really blame the pandemic for the print shop not working. At first, there was just grief that I couldn’t follow through on the plan I made, that I didn’t want to make new work that my heart wasn’t into. It also felt impossible to share the work I had already made while the world was on fire. Partly, I could not figure out how to talk about it, how to sell it, how to make it relatable, but I also had zero interest in figuring out how to make it visible…because I didn’t want to be visible. Being seen did not feel safe, partly because I was still hiding a lot of things from myself. I wanted to hide behind my photos the same way I had with weddings. I wanted the work to be good enough that it would sell on its own, that it spoke for itself, because that had worked for me before. And I genuinely believed that the first version of the print shop failed because I thought that because no one wanted the work, it wasn’t good enough.
The story I’m afraid I’m telling here, and that I’ve told myself, is that I’ve been in a period of failure for the past five years. That I can’t sell, that I can’t make money from my art, or that making money from art is hard – I’ve fully bought in to the starving artist story. And I feel like I’ve been holding it in like a breath I’m afraid to exhale. But I don’t want to believe that anymore, and I don’t want to be ashamed of it anymore. I also don’t want to believe the stories I have about work always leading to burnout or that success is about how much I can produce or how happy I can make my clients or my bosses or even about how profitable my business is. This isn’t going to be a story about how I learned more from my failures than from my successes – because both have value – but I think it might be a story about how my failure stories are what I’m determined to push off of.
I don’t know if the next iteration of my work will succeed. That story hasn’t been written yet. But I have a lot of reasons to feel hopeful. This time around, I’m committed to walking my own path and owning and sharing my story. Writing it here has been more healing than I could have ever possibly imagined. I’m also finally at a place where researching and discovering feels energizing again, and it feels like something I’m genuinely interested in for myself rather than being a form of people-pleasing. But most importantly, I’m committed to building this sustainably and accessibly in every way I possibly can. Sustainable for me, but also sustainably for the planet. Success, this time, is defined by how much my business encourages true self-care and self-discovery for all and, in turn, how much it offers opportunities to support and build the more joyful, vibrant, equitable, and conscious world I want to live in.