It isn't a maze? Well it feels like a maze...I'm already lost.

 I have tried my entire life to like celery. I have put in what many historians would qualify as "a heroic effort". Celery plain? Tried it, hated it. Celery cooked? Tried it. Stringy. Worse tasting. Hated it. Celery with peanut butter and raisins? I would inevitably scoop out the peanut butter and raisins and try to eat that by itself, but the wild, wicked slime of celery's awful flavor had tainted the two best things about what is, all over, an awful fucking lie of a snack. Celery is a bullshit food. It smells gross, it tastes worse, and I am ashamed that so many dishes use celery as an important base component. I don't know who sanctioned that idea, but they should be fired. The closest I have gotten to enjoying celery is drunkenly eating buffalo wings at a bar in Colorado Springs, feeling sad for the pathetic, limp, and strangely warm stick of celery, dipping it in ranch, and thinking to  myself, "...huh. That's only kinda gross. I could maybe eat this sober." 

I was wrong. I have tried for years to enjoy celery with buffalo sauce and ranch, but I think there must be a magic to those two things that only works with alcohol. 

When I was younger, I was not allowed the decadent and wonderful snacks that my friends parents got them. At my house, we had rice cakes, carrots, celery, peanut butter, and raisins. An absolute barf all around. My step sister and I would come home hungry, but because we had the worst snacks available, we had to busy ourselves doing other things to forget that we were hungry. Our parents got together when I was in, I believe, 4th grade. That would make my step sister a 2nd grader. We were both pretty young, but because I was older...and bossy...I pretty much dictated what it was that we would fill our afternoons with. 

I created elaborate, detail oriented stories that we acted out. We had a LOT of stuffed animals and Barbies, because Stephanie's mom and mom's family just showered her with gifts. She had so much stuff it couldn't all possibly all be played with just by her, so I was allowed to play with some of her toys. The first stories I developed were for our stuffed animals. Mostly our bears. I had a Snuggles bear from the 80s that was my go to stuffed animal, given the perfectly imaginative name of Snuggles. I had a lot of imagination, but I spent it on other shit. Naming was inconsequential. Initially, the bear stories were kind of lackluster. I would need a few years to really get into my imaginative groove, so you'll forgive me for not exploding out of the gate with an intricately woven tale for my stuffed animals to play out. 

The first thing I remember really getting into with imagination play time was my stuffed animals hosting elaborate feasts for regal-type gatherings. My step sister had this coloring book that was...and I can't believe this is true...food themed. Specifically eurocentric/colonizer holiday food. The big ones were represented...easter, july 4th, thanksgiving, christmas. Some random food stuff was thrown in there, like candy for halloween, and candy for christmas, and candy for just random days. I tried finding coloring books from the 90s that just featured food in the hopes of stumbling across the images I used with no luck, but I guess food coloring books are still a thing, because I found this, and it is VERY much within the shade of what I was working with as a kid. I would color these images meticulously, I would do  my best to shade them, and then I would cut them out with the utmost care so they just... looked like 2D food. I had a folder of these coloring pages so I could reuse the images and not crease them. A crease in the food drawings I colored in myself would take away the REALNESS. If you're familiar with The Little Princess movie, and how Sara imagines glorious feasts for herself and Becky by verbalizing all of the smells and the aesthetics, that is absolutely what I was doing with my stuffed animals and their sumptuous edibles. My step sister asked if we could tear the food up as they ate it, to show that it was being devoured. I applauded her dedication to the illusion, but that dopey cunt just didn't understand that the food pictures needed to stay PRISTINE. She was never allowed to touch my colored turkey and mashed potatoes. 

Every year at Christmas, we were allowed to open one present on christmas eve, and that present was always always always pajamas. This is something I found to be desperately fucking dumb when I was a kid, and it is now something at 38 that I get upset if I can't do every holiday for my own kids and spouse. Five pajamas is a lot of pajamas, but it's a ritual hill I will die on. 

Full disclosure: The piece of the story I am about to share is going to be quite vague, and that is not intentional. I couldn't recall which aunt got married, and I only landed on my aunt Renee by default. I was maybe 5 when my aunt Mary got married, and while I was a flower girl, anything I wore in that wedding I had long grown out of. My aunt Mei-Ling got married thirty years ago this year, and I am almost positive I was in her wedding, as well, but even at eight, I would have grown out of the things I wore in her wedding, and I also think her color scheme was black and white. That leaves my aunt Renee. Got it? Got it. Moving on toward my possibly incorrect details.

Family ties mandated that I be a member of any wedding party for my family members when I was a little girl. I was in all of my aunt's weddings, and Renee was the last family wedding I was in where it was an obligatory role to be filled. If memory serves, Renee's color scheme was turquoise, and because it was the early nineties, the dress I wore was a turquoise monstrosity made of lace, with an asymmetrical peplum skirt made of satin, or a similar material. I hated the dress, I believe the dress had color matching gloves that I hated, as well. And really, I shouldn't talk too much shit. I think someone's mom made the dresses for Renee's bridal party. Ann? My memory says it was my uncle Wayne's mom, but my memory is not always reliable. 

But. But but but. 

There were shoes. Turquoise dyed, medium height heels, and they were my very first pair of heels, and I. Loved. THEM. Wearing heels made me feel so glamorous and grown up, and when I tell you I wore those heels EVERYWHERE, I mean everywhere in my house. My mom wouldn't let me wear them out. I wasn't even technically supposed to take them out of their box in the closet. As if my vanity and stubbornness would listen to such a ridiculous directive.  So I wore those turquoise heels around my room all the time. 

I had grown tired of my food parties with my bears. I could only imagine so many reasons to gather at a feast, and my step sister was never keen on adopting an accent or doing different voices, or even implementing story lines full of intrigue, so there really wasn't much upward mobility in this imaginary game. I turned my attention instead to my desire to be a D-I-V-A. I wanted to be famous. And I think this is something I've mentioned occasionally in my blog, that I harboured a deep desire to be loved and worshiped by throngs of fans. It didn't even matter WHAT they adored me for, just that they did. I believe I've also mentioned that my mom didn't let me listen to era appropriate music, I had to listen to the oldies station. So I turned my attention to imagining myself as an absolutely BELOVED stage performer. A dual act, even! I was a singer AND a dancer. 

And listen. 

There are SO FUCKING MANY amazing femme acts from the 50s and 60s. The Ronettes? Come the fuck on. The Supremes? FUCK YOU THEY ARE AMAZING. The Shirelles? And don't even get me fucking STARTED on Freda fucking PAYNE (though I do believe Band of Gold is from 1970) or Dusty Springfield. Did I choose to be a dancing singer for any of these performers that I myself was a massive fan of to act out my fantasies of being an incredible artist?

Nope. 

Instead, I went with Del fucking Shannon and The Four Tops. And no shade, The Four Tops are fantastic. I really love them. But I have no idea why I went with them, and I really have no idea why I went with Del Shannon. I guess I was super into subversive performance at the ripe age of ten. 

I had a three song line up, are you ready for this? My opener was Runaway, by Del Shannon:

A real crowd pleaser. 

I followed up with I'll Be There by The Four Tops:

A classic.

And my big finish was Bernadette, also by the Four Tops. I guess I imagined myself to be the Four Tops more than I imagined myself to be Del Shannon. 

I  may not have been playing with 2D food and stuffed animals anymore, but I still had use for the table the feasts had previously been held on. I needed a stage. Unfortunately, the table was an unreliable venue. It was rickety and unbalanced. What's a girl to do when she needs a stage to perform her gender bending oldies covers? She uses a chair! But not just any chair...one of these bad larries:

It was textured. It was wobbly. It did not have enough room for my big ass feet. But I made it work, because I had to literally be above my crowd, so I could look down on them as I performed. 

And I really put my all into the performance. I choreographed a dance to each song. Dance is being a little generous, actually, what I did was repeat a series of wild hand gestures in perfect time to the rise and fall of each song while I swayed my hips and occasionally moved my feet, because if I moved them too much I would fall off of my tiny little stage and hurt myself. I had an outfit, too. 

One of my favorite pairs of pajamas I ever received at christmas was a two piece set of long johns in a very soft fabric. Like...like a brushed llama. The fabric was a delicate cream color, and it had a floral pattern all over it that just absolutely screamed Laura Ashley. I was wild about these pajamas. I would have worn them to school if I could have, they made me feel so pretty. Even prettier than the Princess Jasmine pajamas I had gotten two years earlier that I had long outgrown, but still stuffed myself into, despite the vaginal wedgie, because I loved pretending I was as beautiful and brave as Princess Jasmine was. These pajamas were it for me. If I had died, falling off of that chair in a tragic Del Shannon related incident, my final thoughts would be fervent hopes that I be buried in those pajamas. And I finished off the outfit with the turquoise heels from my aunts wedding. 

In my head, this was a LEWK. I was just fucking killing it aesthetically. Murdering style and serving it up to anybody who came near me. I can tell you that the crowd of stuffed animals and poorly tended Barbies, often showing up to my concerts nude because I guess I was really feeling a Coachella style approach to concerts, really loved my sense of style. However, in reality, I had a mop of frizzy, untamed hair on my head, in a matching pajama pants set, with turquoise heels that pinched my feet. This is very much how I feel like dressing circa now when I have a full on bout of depression eating me up inside, but I have to go somewhere nice. I'm not sure if I can qualify myself as ahead of my time or not. I'll leave that up to the lawyers. 

Around this time, my little sister was born, and my mom was home on maternity leave. I was 11 at time, and I was desperate to soak up any time with my mom that I could, even though my memories of her at this age were either frazzled because she was parenting a newborn and an 11 year old and a 9 year old, or her being really fucking cruel about the art I created by laughing at it when I shared things like poetry, or stories, with her. So any way I could just...be around my mom and have her be quiet and nice was an opportunity I jumped at. She would put on soap operas. She was a massive General Hospital fan, and this was like, General Hospital Golden Era. The Luke and Laura super years. When everything was honey hued and fucking DRUHMAHTICK. 

A dangerous thing for me to watch, especially in light of needing to take on a new imagination game, as I was fast growing out of my shoes and that chair was just too small for my developing body. General Hospital gave me ideas of malicious grandeur, and I moved on to creating elaborate stories for Barbie.

 Poor Barbie. 

Nothing nice ever happened to Barbie in my barbie games. Because Stephanie's moms bought her so much stuff, we truly had an embarrassment of Barbie riches. The Fold N' Fun Barbie dream house?

 Stephanie had it, so by extension, I had it, too. We had add ons, like Barbie's bubble bath:

And I think this must have been a holdver from like, a thrifting excursion or something, because when I went to look this up, it said 80s. And this heady era of barbie capitalism fever dream was definitely in the 90s. 

Parked outside of the Barbie foldable house was Barbie's RV:

My Nonni got me the Barbie Stable (complete with Horbie, the Barbie horse! That isn't actually the horse's  name, but it should have been), and it was a whole little thing. Barbie and Horbie matched, and Horbie had like...her hooves were stamps, I think. Little horseshoe stamps. Barbie had this whole like, disco fringe look going, and I recall a lot of silver stars that I was meant to be able to put in my own hair, but having coarse, frizzy, curly hair, they only ever knotted my hair up and got lost in the mess. OH MY GOD, OK, I WAS CLOSE WITH THIS BARBIE, but I was so wrong about the name. Oh my god, this delights me to no end, because this Barbie was my second favorite, and it's so funny to see her almost thirty years later. Behold...Western Stampin' Barbie and her Western Star Horse!

BARBIE'S COUNTRY WESTERN BOOT SPURS WERE STAMPS, TOO. How could I forget that??

While I appreciate the practicality in the jeans Barbie is rockin' on the back of that box, you know that isn't what Barbie was ACTUALLY wearing. Western Stampin' Barbie chose form over function and wore a silver lame' miniskirt:

But look at the FRINGE. The big hair, the boots, the fucking HAT, and the earrings. Barbie is an icon, if not an impractical idiot about how to dress when riding a horse.

We had Barbie's pink convertible:

We had Barbie's Grocery store:

Our barbies truly wanted for nothing. 

Nothing except peace. 

I put my Barbies through the absolute RINGER. Ken was an abusive alcoholic that lived to beat on poor Barbie. Barbie was sad and miserable, and in love with the local horse cop, Brad (Brad was another Ken, but we couldn't have two Kens, for obvious reasons). Of course, Brad was a cop that rode a horse, not a horse that worked as an officer of the law. Barbie was strictly into humans, and pretty fucking bisexual, might I add. Again, the more I recount stories from my childhood, the more embarrassed I am that it took me into my twenties go go, "YUP. I'm queer." 

Ken always wound up dead at the end of these stories, covered in ketchup to sell the idea that he died in a horrific, painful death as karmic retribution while Brad and Barbie made out passionately over Ken's lifeless corpse. 

While Barbie has been set up as many things by Mattel...she's a grocer (hard working entrepreneur!), a veterinarian (diligent medical professional!), a ballet wiz (graceful and talented artist!), an ice princess (ice princess!), these forced titles were a little too...not crimey for my tastes. Barbie was an innocent victim of patriarchal misogyny and physical abuse about 50 percent of the time, but the rest of the time, Barbie was a bank robber, an art thief, a rodeo start that stole all of her prized horses from a rival rodeo star, Barbie was a chameleon. Through Barbie, I was able to channel my budding penchant for elaborate fantasy stories, and toxic relationships with abusive men. 

I went and spent some time with a family friend on San Marcos island, and while I was visiting, she took me to the Teddy Bear Museum. This trip absolutely rekindled my love of imagination time revolving around my stuffed animals, so I learned to split my time between abusing and tormenting my Barbies and making my stuffed animals go on absolutely fucking BONKERS adventures. And I was like, David Lynch levels of intricate in these stories. I wrote books on various things that concerned whatever storyline I had in store for my bears by measuring how big the pages would be in my bear's hands, cutting out a bunch of sheets to fit that size, stapling them together, and literally writing for hours about things like surviving a flood (for days I played bears when it was storming). I came up with really fucking dumb bear related names for authors, the one I remember being the most prolific was also the least imaginative. Bear E. Naut. This was something I was proud of twofold: one, because I was writing it, and a bear I was not. Get it? Gross. Secondly, because I spelled NAUT the way that you spelled astroNAUT, and my bears were great adventurers! 

These forays into my past make me loathe myself and love myself more in equal measure, so it all evens out by the time I'm done writing. 

I was curious to see if the Teddy Bear Museum was still around...it is not. It closed in 2005. I truly loved the whimsy of the place, though. It was modeled to look like a massive forest where teddy bears just....lived their little teddy bear lives. They moved, they sang songs, they had adorable little bear homes in fake trees. There were bear houses out and about. I wandered through this museum and I longed to have a set up like this for my bears to live out the elaborate plots I wrote for them. No dice for me, my pillow forts that I made when the bears would run into a rough patch on their adventure to whatever far off land they needed to explore (one time they had to go to the moon for gold. I can't remember why they needed gold, or how they got to the moon, but I'm sure it was all very reasonable). 

Bears and barbies were like...a gateway drug. I had the taste for story telling now, and I wanted to be able to relive the wonderful yarns I was weaving. 

So when I was about thirteen, MAYBE twelve, I wrote a screenplay. An entire screen play. There were lines. There were directives for what a camera would be doing. There were set changes. There was intrigue. There was drama. There was a demand made upon my step dad by me to film this, and he fucking acquiesced. So now we had a film crew (my step dad and a handheld VHS recorder). We had a set designer (me). We had a wardrobe supervisor (me and my step-dad's mom, who took me to the thrift store and let me buy whatever costumes I needed to tell my story). We had props provided by the wardrobe supervisor. And we had a star (me) and the person the star benevolently allowed to play alongside her (my step sister). I am sure this has long been recorded over, but at one time, a video existed of the one and only play I have ever written. Are you ready for the plot?

Two princesses from rival kingdoms visit each other in an attempt to kill the other off, hoping to accumulate their land and wealth. Each princess, on their visit, overhears the other plotting to kill her. They both die, because they're both stupid. 

Now the last sentence is not what I wrote in the screen play, but it is the gist. Initially, I had written it so I outsmarted my sister's princess and she ended up dead and I ended up richer and more powerful (don't act so shocked), but this made Stephanie cry foul, and her dumb dad made me change it. I wasn't about to let her live, OR let them get along, so instead, I had them both fucking merc'ed by a THIRD, surprise princess. 

Legendary.

By the time I hit 14, I had stopped playing with barbies, I had stopped playing with my bears, I had stopped with my imaginative flights of fancy when I was forced to play outside, because my peers made me feel like a baby for still using my creativity to enjoy myself. I felt dumb for longing to pick up my barbies and throw Ken over a cliff because he beat her so, and I felt childish for wanting my bears to have a 2D picnic in the Amazon because they were searching for a special kind of grape that cured Bear Flu (that was a fun one). I still wanted to use my imagination, but I didn't want to do it in a way that I would get made fun of. 

So I went back to my roots and played Singing Competition. The game was, I would sing, and no matter how badly I sang, my step sister had to give me a perfect score. Not imaginative, not creative, but I was a winner every time, so it was definitely fun for me! My sister did not have as good a time, though. I had to make the game somewhat involved for her, so she was allowed to give me a song suggestion at the beginning of Singing Competition for me to sing. And she would give me something awful, like Metallica, and I would throw a fit and say, "NO, THAT ISN'T THE GAME, TELL ME TO SING MARIAH CAREY'S HERO!" and she would pout, tell me to sing Mariah Carey's Hero, and after I sang it, she would give me Five Stars and I would win. 

Singing Competition was my favorite. 

But eventually, she grew tired of this, too. And I had nobody to really play with me. Not even my baby sister, who was three, could get into my imagination games...so I just...had nothing to do anymore but imagine my elaborate crushes could be into me, even though I looked the way I looked. 

I have been fortunate enough to not fully give up on my imagination. I live a pretty rich, vibrant life in my head. I write short stories when the mood strikes. I day dream constantly. I dream up photoshoots and try and figure them out with Derek. I dream up trips we can take. I dreamt for years about a life with my oldest in it. I have spent thirty plus years using my imagination to save me from heartache, to make me forget when things aren't going the way I want, to help me, in a dozen or more ways, to become the person I am, right now, writing this blog. 

In the extreme vastness of the things I have imagined, of the many things I have created for myself in a world without limits or boundaries, the ONE fucking thing I could never imagine is taking a bite out of celery and going, YUP. That hits the spot. 

I can imagine just about anything. I just can't imagine that. 

Is it time to eat?

Way back in the way back times, maybe in my late teens, I carried a bulky burden of existential dread surrounding aging. I remember having the concept of a "scary age"; an age where, if I didn't have everything I dreamt for myself accomplished, I should just give everything up and welcome death. At 17, my scary age was twenty three. Twenty. Fucking. THREE. Because most teenagers have no real concept of time, I assumed that having a college degree, figuring out who I was, and perhaps finding a partner, were all things that could reasonably be accomplished in a five year period. I'm not sure if I miss being that oblivious and naïve or not. 

I accomplished none of those things by the time I reached my scary age, though I did move the goal posts a bit. My new scary age at 23 was 30. Thirty seemed proper scary. I noticed that nobody made excuses for doing dumb shit in your thirties, that was what your twenties were for! I was frightened of having to have everything all figured out in seven years. Thirty seemed scary not for what I might not accomplish, but for what I was expected to become upon reaching that age. Responsible. All knowing. Capable. I didn't get to live a lot of my teenage years like my friends did, so I spent a lot of my twenties engaging in the hilarious, dumb, irresponsible behavior that 16 year olds get to do without reservation. I did drugs, I fucked around, I bounced from job to job, I tried on so many different iterations of myself with lightning speed, abandoning them just as quickly, and I truly enjoyed the process. 

Turning thirty didn't turn out to be the nightmare scenario I dreamed up for myself. It was a difficult year for me, but those difficulties were not related to my socioeconomic status, my lack of a spouse, my lack of a degree, or my lack of a "career". I didn't feel unfulfilled as an unmarried woman in college without a spouse, I felt fairly free to continue discovering who I was. I picked up a sense of agency and ran with it. 

My thirties have been the most interesting decade of my life so far. I've come to find an ease in the day to day that I never got to have as a kid, and I appreciate the safety of the most mundane aspects of my life. Do I fight with my husband? Absolutely. Am I afraid he's going to beat me if I defend myself? No. Am I broke? Oh yes. Is that brokeness coming with food insecurity, or housing insecurity? No. Am I concerned that one day, I'll walk in on Derek packing and telling me he sold the house out from under me and I have 24 hours to get out? No. All of the problems I have come with a gentle promise of an outcome that won't leave me in a far worse place than I find myself currently. I understand the privilege I have here, and trust that I do not take it for granted. I came up desperately poor. I've gone hungry. I've been homeless. I've been abused. I know what the other side of this ease looks like, and I think there may always be a small part of me that is convinced I've dreamt it all, and I'm still at the mercy of the wildness of the Las Vegas streets. I recognize that all of this could come crashing down around me at any moment. Capitalism is unsafe, even the parts of it I like, so that lives in my head, too. But for the most part, my thirties have given me the ability to reflect, figure myself out, give myself space and forgiveness, and come into my own. There is nothing scary for me about these years. 

All of that being said, I noticed myself having a small...I guess panic the other day. 

I turned 38 on July 26th. The number itself isn't what bothers me, I feel amazing. I work out every day, I eat well, I garden, I relax, I spend time with my kids, I take vacations and don't feel like I HAVE to recharge during the time off. 38 feels young, I feel young, I feel fantastic. Being close to 40 isn't a thing I'm freaked out by because of the expectations I had as a kid of what 40 would look like or feel like. I've blown away the ageism I had growing up. What bothers me is I feel like I'm getting too old for people to take me seriously in the things I enjoy, and that I'm running out of time to really cement myself as someone who does X thing. 

I think this the most about photography. I find myself freaking out about being a 38 year old that is trying to carve out a niche in mermaid photography. I started doing it in Hawai'i four years ago, and I carved out a pretty good space for myself. I was doing pretty well when covid hit, and then when covid restrictions eased, I started up again and was doing better than I had been doing before. When I left island, I had quite a few inquiries that I know would have spawned into more business, word was getting around about my photos. I was laying a foundation for myself, and I am having to start all over again in Missouri. I spent a year trying to find places I could go to do mermaid shoots, and it's been HARD. There are places here that work, but they're all at least two hours away, if not more (echo bluffs is only an hour and a half, but all of the other places I love? Three hours MINIMUM). It was a struggle initially to find models to go to every location I wanted to market, though that struggle has substantially eased, enough so I have two locations up and marketed right now. But I'm still starting from scratch again, and I feel like pushing 40 is too old to be selling a fantasy that most kids get over before they hit their mid teens. This, of course, is not true. Most of the people I've worked with, model AND client, have been older people. I think the oldest client I had was in their late forties, and the youngest people I've shot that AREN'T actually children are in their early twenties, and everybody else has fallen in between. Clearly, this is not a fantasy that is limited by age. But I FEEL like it is. I feel pathetic, at almost 40, to be peddling mermaid photoshoots because it feels inappropriate for my age. 

It isn't, though. Fantasy has no age limit. And photography as a profession has no age limit. I don't need to be twenty five to be a photographer everyone takes seriously, but something in my head tells me that photography as a job is for the young. That I squandered my time to be taken seriously, and I should just stick to real estate photography, which is technically the title I should be saying when I tell people I'm a photographer. 90% of my work is real estate. And I'm no snob, I make good money, and I've gotten much better at it than I was when I picked it up in Colorado circa 2012. WAY better. I enjoy it, and I suspect I won't ever stop doing it, but I want to get to a place where only 20% of what I do is real estate, and the rest is all portraits, mermaid, boudoir, or otherwise. I'd even take weddings, even though I have never really liked the high stakes stress that comes with that. 

There's just....a tugging in the back of my head that tells me I'm too old. Maybe it's the distribution of people I see in the industry? Most boudoir photographers are straight, cis men (gross. Grossssssssssss. GROSS. I hate it. I hate it so fucking much), and another large portion of boudoir photographers are young cis woman. I know my experiences are anecdotal, but a VERY small percentage of boudoir photographers are my age or older. I've met hundreds of photographers, no exaggeration, and I've done the aging legwork. It makes me feel like I just...missed my window, and I need to calm the fuck down and stop trying to be something I've aged out of. Creativity doesn't have an age limit, really, but society does, and I feel like I low key buy into the idea that my abilities and my worth are dropping in value, minute by minute, and as I age, I will get uglier, and who wants ugly people taking their photos? 

I used to love this game called Mindtrap. It was less a game and more a box of riddles. I recall reading through all of them when I was like....nine or ten...and being able to solve none of them, and needing to look at the solutions. I would read and re-read the solutions, and it was like teaching myself how to think better. The one I think about the most says that you're walking into a barbershop for a haircut. There are two barbers, one with a great hair cut, and another with a really fucked up hair cut. Which barber do you select to cut your hair? Mindtrap says you pick the barber with the fucked up hair to cut your hair, because obviously they cut the hair of the barber who looks fantastic, we leave out all nuance and other questions from the equation, we don't bother to ask how their CLIENTS look, we don't even ask if the barbers cut their own hair! We just make assumptions, and that's the right answer. Of course, reflecting back on that game at 38, particularly that question, I realize that I wasn't really learning how to think better, I was learning how to feel smug about assuming SMARTER than other people assumed. But I still think about that scenario with the two barbers all the time when I think about my own career as a photographer. 

Photography is all about aesthetics. It doesn't quite know how to be anything else. You may feel when you look at a photograph...I know I sure have a fuckload of feelings when I look at some of my favorite photos. The works of Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, Leonard Freed, and Raymond Depardon give me alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the fucking feelings (mostly envy, because they're all so fucking talented. Or at least, revered for their unique eye instead of talent. Like Diane Arbus and Sally Mann), but...it's a feeling from a LOOK. The look sets the mood, I can't feel the mood without looking at it. Do photographers do the same thing? I feel like people are more inclined to choose a good looking photographer than they are an unattractive photographer, or an aged photographer, because there are all of these assumptions about how that ugliness, or that age, will be projected onto their finished work. I can't say for sure, I've done zero leg work on any of this. But it's the primary motivator of my fear that I am getting too fucking old to be taken seriously as a photographer. 

There is a caveat to this, of course...I will be taken seriously as a photographer if I glam myself up. If I am always in a full beat, hair coiffed, clothes on point, people will be like, oh yeah. Yeah, she's a photographer I can trust, look at her! Instead, I just look like a regular human femme with somewhat manageable depression. Right now I can't quite bring myself to shower (I restarted my meds today, so hopefully in a few days I'll be back on track and feeling good enough to manage basic hygiene), so my hair is stringy, I'm in athletic leggings and a sports bra, and I kinda smell. I couldn't show up looking like this next to another femme photographer who looks all cute and put together and have someone choose me as the photographer. There is no Mindtrap riddle for this scenario...I get left in the dust for myriad reasons. It's one of the reasons I love being a real estate photographer...I get hired on my portfolio ALONE, and I can show up looking however the fuck I want (95% of the homes I shoot are staged and empty).

The point being, I am not in a panic over aging, I'm just...panicked about what my aging will signal about my capabilities and my talents.