42/52 // i went to this spot for a little bird. and it was here that i put it together in my mind, waiting for the literal light. i strung together that my second light would be fading soon.

42/52 // this photo has never felt like mine. and i was right, about all of it.

42/52 // i thought this photo was a dud when i took it but when i look at it now, it’s like what it feels like to no longer be homesick. “…’a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all,’ merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.” that’s what i think it feels like when the “homesick” feeling goes away. so photo kids, this is why i tell you not to delete photos on your camera, upload them, keep them, revisit them, because after a day, a week, a month, or many, you might see something you missed in that tiny lcd screen.

42/52 // i don’t think i like this photo very much but there’s something about the way the light crests on the hill. if you don’t look, you won’t see.

49/52 // this photo felt like the most honest one i’d taken in awhile. and to go back to 2024, it gave me the chest tingly thing to post it, so i know it was true and right to do so, no matter how scary. at the same time, i know no one wants the sad poetic girl who mourns the things that don’t even exist… but i remember her from when she was 8 and again in junior high and at 16, 19, and 21 and 27 and 33 and now... so i can’t push her aside, she’s who am i.

7/52 // i take this picture every year. and usually keep it for myself. except for the year of *“nothin’ but time”* and this year, when i thought it just might be happening again. it wasn’t.

At the end of 2023, I started to “come back to life” as my father likes to say. Which I suppose is neither here nor there for the context of this reflection… But in order to understand where we’ve ended up, we have to go back to, well, not the start, but the middle? In order to “come back to life” for myself, in order to do it for real, I without much thought, dove into project 365, on January 1st, 2024. Which, was actually 366 because lemon life (TM) and leap year… And I figured out a lot of things through that process of finding a photograph every single day. Finding, stumbling upon, searching for, creating. I listened, I watched, I waited, I set it up. The coolest thing about 365 was each photograph holds an exact moment of the day that I can instantly recall when I look at it. What was said, what I felt, the things I did and didn’t do… It’s all there, a visual journal of an entire year. [This is why I highly recommend you attempt it, at least once in your life]. As much pressure as it was, it’s maybe one of the best things I’ve ever done. I said it from the start, it was like a vitamin, one-a-day. It gave me something that I had lost. And I’m glad to have found that thing again.

Switching to a photo a week for 2025, rather than a day, was denser. Less photos, but…the photos felt like they needed to carry more weight than those of 366/2024. They needed a narrative. I set a tone and I aimed to achieve it. A photo a week is nothing like a photo a day… It slowed down time. It wasn’t about visually appealing images, (I mean, it still was, duh) but it was about saying something more. So I threw out any caution and went deeper. And it was really hard. I wanted to quit, a lot. Half way through, I stopped photographing for the weekly “prompt” and started creating the images first, finding a prompt to fit them later. And maybe that’s cheating, or maybe that’s just backward design. Whatever you want to call it, I think it made me a better artist, a better writer, a better thinker, but it also made me long for things I wish I didn’t. It created a rift in my soul that won’t close now that I’ve wedged it back open. And all that feeling will slip in and out of it unchecked for all time, always.

So I think this is my main point for you, dear reader, of my little internet void: If expression is blocked, then, that thing — will just never exist and it will be lost. And as an artist there’s about a million battles to fight, and one of the biggest and longest you’ll fight is fear. There are many fruitless fights against different types of fears and many of them, don’t really matter…The big one is keeping the line open. To search, to find, to make, even when you’re not sure the world wants to see it, even when you’re scared to show it, even when you’re not really sure what it is you’ve created. And it’s sort of beautiful and awful and wonderful and painful. The best way I can think to describe it is to say it comes down to how you wish to live. The fear of asking yourself: Do you know who you are? Do you want to live this way? (Thanks Shonda Rhimes and Christina Yang, thanks a lot).

I feel too much, I think too much, I hold too much. This we know. And it’s something that should be corrected? Maybe, maybe not. I struggle with it, wrestle with it. Learn it, unlearn it. Except, I’m actually not learning anything because I can’t seem to make it stick. It always comes back to the same thing… My other big fear: losing things. The idea of not seeing, the idea of not knowing, not keeping...scares me too much. I have to keep the things that matter, forever, in whatever ways they can be kept:

photographs on this blog,
words on scraps of paper, in journals, in this realm,
ticket stubs folded into the pages of said journals,
a little jar with vincent’s toenails in my cupboard,
the receipt from the restaurant tucked behind a picture in a frame,
the scrap of paper with my grandmother’s handwriting on it next her perfume in the linen closet,
the last drawing I made you in my junk drawer,
the decorations on the envelop from a letter from my mother stuck to the side of my fridge,
a screenshot of a story of two trees intertwining sent by my dad at 3:00a.m. in a folder on my hard drive,
the starfish anklet my niece made in the back of my make-up drawer,
all have to kept.

I am the keeper of things. I am too sensitive. I’ve always said, "I’m too sensitive for this world.” Said as a joke, said as truth, said to lighten the mood, said to make my point, said to excuse whatever nonsense I felt… I don’t let things go, I hold on to them. I am a sponge. I absorb things. More than I should, this I know. And hey, I know what I know.

While photographing in 2024, I kept some photos to myself. Some days, I took a photo that I didn’t want anyone to see, I wanted to keep it, only for me and so I shot more that day and came up with something else. I did the same this year for project 52/2025. I held on to photographs and didn’t post them. I wanted them for me. So in going back through my 52/2025 folder, I found a few that feel like they should’ve been seen, because it is my business, my fight, to keep the line open, to search, to find, to make. Artists are not like athletes, we can’t beat each other, we can’t win, because we’re all playing our own game, making up our own rules. So, make a lot or a little, make it visually appealing, or make it deep… I think, it might not matter, as long as the line stays open, and we create.

There’s only one week left of project 52, and it’s really just a couple of days, because this year will end on Wednesday. So it’s probably time to ask those questions again. Do you know who you are? Do you want to live this way? And maybe I don’t want to live this way, as the keeper of things. Maybe in 2026, I’ll let some things go. In thinking of that, in trying to grow, I took a look back through project 52 and found a few photos I was holding on to that you didn’t see. This isn’t all of them, change doesn’t happen overnight but I suppose it nudges the needle a little. In the interest of wanting to grow, to let go, and wanting to remember and hold, forever with a war of worlds inside me, these are the photos you didn’t see.

So, for the last time in 2025, I guess I’ll see you next week.