I once read somewhere that your 20s are the hardest decade of your life.
Being only 26 years old, and with much of my life still yet to be lived, I can’t really say whether or not this is true. I do know, however, that for myself, the 20s have been a rather difficult decade so far, and I’ve only just passed the halfway mark.
My story for today begins on a chilly Spring night in April nearly two months ago. I was experiencing what my older self will undoubtedly look back on as an episode of immature, “woe-is-me” sulking. Panicking and thinking I wasn’t creating anything worthy of a customer’s money, I felt like my dream of becoming a full-time photoartist was slipping through my fingers, one unnoticed blog post at a time. This pattern of thought is an inevitable trail you find yourself walking down when you want to be making a living doing what makes you happy, and yet you feel like no one is seeing your work and/or no one cares. It’s a dangerous path to find yourself on.
After a tear-filled phone call with my sister that lasted into the night, I walked down to my car, climbed in the back seat, prayed to my Heavenly Father, and cried. I sat there for a long time, waiting for an answer to come, wishing that my answer would come instantaneously, a screaming revelation on the wings of a desperate prayer. Instead, the only response was a numbing silence, the car doors muting even the small sounds of the outside world. After a while, my inner demons of pride and despair having sufficiently duked themselves out in the backseat, I climbed back up the cold wooden stairs to my room and went to bed. Still upset, but feeling at least a little bit lighter for having expressed my frustrations to my Heavenly Father, I fell asleep not long after.
The next morning, as I rolled over to turn off the soft sounds of my alarm emanating from the phone I had tucked under the pillow three snoozes ago, the answer I had waited so patiently for in the car settled into my mind. It was as if it had been lurking in the back of my thoughts the whole time, waiting for despair to finish its silly little performance and exit the stage. As if the clouds of anger had finally parted, allowing inspiration’s light to shine through. The thought was this:
Magic comes from the heart.
Just a simple little thought, yet it voiced everything I had been doing wrong for the past few weeks. True happiness… true magic doesn’t ever come from a desire to make something that people will want to buy or that will make the creator a lot of money. It doesn’t even come from a purely desperate desire to create, just so you have something to post on your instagram page or your blog.
It comes from doing what you love, from taking the experiences in your life and making something beautiful out of them. The masterpieces come when people share their stories in a way that others can see the beauty that comes not just from our joys and excitements, but also from our griefs and heartaches.
I needed to return to the most fundamental reason of why I started doing photography in the first place: which was because I love it. Not because my friends love it, or my parents, or the people who follow my work. I create because I have stories to tell and emotions to share and because, above all else, I love to create beauty.
And just like that, the idea for a new piece popped into my head. An idea of a girl, clutching her magic close to her, allowing her heart to create light and beauty in a place filled with darkness. With a little searching, I found my new idea perfectly articulated by Jim Butcher in his book “Fool Moon.” Admittedly I have never read Mr. Butcher’s book, but I think the quote still holds true:
“Magic comes from the heart, from your feelings, your deepest expressions of desire. […] My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour. It came from […] my life. From the hope that I could make things better for someone else, if not always for me. Somewhere, in all of that, I touched on something that wasn’t tapped out, in spite of how horrible the past days had been, something that hadn’t gone cold and numb inside of me. I grasped it, held it in my hand like a firefly, and willed its energy out[.]”
-Jim Butcher
With Mr. Butcher’s words in my head, and a message I wanted to share, it was as if all the pieces fell into place, as if my image was creating itself. It was as if I couldn’t NOT make this piece, a piece that came from the only place my work should ever have come from: my heart. So today I wanted to share what sets me heart and soul on fire, my latest piece, Magic’s Origin:
Perhaps in the future, when my inner demons decide they would like to come out and play again, I will look at this image and tell pride and despair that they’ve had their turn. It’s time for inspiration to come and take center stage. In the meantime, may we all remember that joy and magic come first from the heart.
Yours,
P.S. Stay tuned for next week’s post, in which I post all the behind the scenes details. I might even include a video of the creation of the dress worn in the image!
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