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.
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