How I Wanted to Live | Pursuing Passions
Lately, I’ve been admitting to myself and others that I’m living the life. I work for myself. I photograph love for a living. I live in an amazing apartment in a city of my very own choosing. I travel. I would be a fool to deny that this is incredible. But my lifestyle is so far off from what most of my peers are doing, I’m often not sure how to talk about it.
More than anything, I don’t want to give off the wrong impression. It’s far too easy to aggrandize this “living the life” declaration into a great endeavor or some huge achievement. I don’t feel like this has been the noble pursuit of passions that many people give speeches on. And I want to help people to see through it all. None of this is all that extraordinary or unattainable. I didn’t barrel through life with determination or purpose. In fact, I stumbled upon most of the pieces, and I’m still not done stumbling yet.
The first half of my life went largely as prescribed. I did well in school, got into a good university, and even embarked as a pre-med student. But by sophomore year, my approach shifted. Something caused me to abandon the set path, and it wasn’t a passion for photography or a desire to start a business. To the contrary, I still had no better plan than becoming a doctor. Creating a new path had nothing to do with what I wanted to do, but how I wanted to live. Balance. Control over my own time, variety in my schedule, and daily explorations of the world around me.
It was also just as much about cowardice as courage. People don’t often mention cowardice in the story of their pursuit of passions, but I would not have done any of this without a hearty dose of fear. When it came to being pre-med at Duke, a huge part of me was just scared to compete within the prescribed rules; I was a tiny, tiny fish in a huge ocean. I feared failure. But I was also just audacious enough to think I could abandon that whole game, make up my own rules, and get away with it. So rather than choose a career path or climb a ladder of success, I started to create a lifestyle for myself. I began by designing my own major.
The short version of what happened next is that I graduated, decided to move to California, taught for a year, worked in an after school program for a year, and only in the last 6 months have I begun doing photography full time. Each of these steps has developed just as much because of serendipity and the graciousness of others around me as it has because of my constant referral back to how I want to live. I have a million more things I would love to share about each of the steps I’ve taken and all of the things that are still hanging on by a thread, yet to be determined. But I will save that for another post. For now I’ll say this– I am incredibly thankful to have made my way here.
If anyone out there is feeling stuck in their lives, trapped by what they are doing and unsure what they should be doing instead, I invite you to imagine– how do you want to live? Painting the picture in your mind has an amazing way of helping you to make things fall into place. There’s nothing more beautiful than realizing you can see an answer and and actualize it in your own life.
A photograph to top off my feelings of how amazing it is to live a life that I love. Sunset, from the last wedding that I shot this year. Real life sure beats photoshop.
