Practicing.

Might as well!

When I was 14, we used to do calisthenics at the start of 4th period. We’d stretch our arms out into a T shape and touch opposite toes, rotating at the hip and keeping our arms straight. Our backs and tummies made appearances above low-rise jeans.

I often think about how we are always practicing for something upcoming, a moment around the corner that today’s life calisthenics may help out with. I started thinking this way when I was 21, when three sudden grand mal seizures landed me in the hospital. A scan showed a mass in my brain, some swelling, and bleeding. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so calm about it all. Lots of scary words were being used, ones that should have made me feel a tightening sense of doom. Instead, I felt fully capable. What if I had been practicing for this without knowing it? At that point, I’d had a decade of chronic migraines, I was familiar with the territory of illness. What if all that pain could be helpful for once? What if I could be good at being not okay?

Anyway, the story of my brain blob is a story for another day, one that now feels tucked in the past and a little too intense to bring up. But, here I am writing a Substack and I might as well think about why. It’s more practice! Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect isn’t real. But it makes something.

When I first graduated with my photojournalism degree, I felt simultaneously full of confidence and completely freaked out. I wasn’t the best photographer in my graduating class by far, and I had a lot of work to do. So, I started self-assigning little projects to myself. For a while, I challenged myself to find stories within a two-block radius of my little apartment in Missoula, Montana. I photographed the local Lutheran minister and the workers at a tattoo parlor. I still felt like I needed more practice, especially dealing with weird light and (sometimes even weirder) people. I started a blog in the height of the blog era in which I’d photograph and interview a stranger every week. I called it “Who I Met.”

Then, over a decade later, when I was planning on photographing and writing a book, I was seized with anxiety about the written portion. Despite writing an entire novella at age 11 about being a passenger on the Titanic, I am not a writer. I have no business at the keyboard except emails and Lightroom commands. The idea of comment sections or book reviews made me queasy. So, I started pitching stories in which I would photograph and write. A few of them got picked up. I somehow survived the tortuous heave of writing and vulnerability of internet reviews. I made my book. The exposure therapy helped.

It’s common practice in photojournalism to self-assign personal projects. It’s usually how we communicate to ourselves and to our editors the most clearly. It’s how we say, “this is who I am and what I’m interested in” or “think of these projects when you assign stories to me, this is how I can shine.” But those are also the instances in which we get to take the biggest risks, maybe mess up a little, give ourselves more time and leniency. Which leads to discovery.

The best projects, whether assigned to us or assigned by ourselves to ourselves, are the ones that make us alternate between going outward and going inward. I’ve become quite practiced at that outward reach: towards people I’m photographing, the communities I visit, different lighting scenarios, and the business of it all. I’ve also become accustomed to the inward work: checking my ethics, examining my feelings, and following lines of inquiry about how and why I work the way I do. Intertwining my work with my psychology. I like to think my photos demonstrate the external efforts, but I’m terrible at sharing the internal gunk and the personal discoveries. I could use some practice.

And is it worth it to share? Do I need to shout into the void? Probably not, but perhaps there is some value in listening to our lessons and taking some notes, then scooting the notebook across the desk to other students. Bending towards one another to check our work and share what we learned.

Delights:

• Storygraph for keeping up with my reading as a less-corporate alternative to Goodreads. Shoutout to founder and CEO Nadia Odunayo for making something great and to my friend Hannah Yoon for recommending it to me. Find me on Storygraph here.

• A great documentary about sex researcher Shere Hite.

• Sharon Van Etten’s new album. No skips.

• Amy from Amyl and the Sniffers and her righteous rage (warning, swears).

  

  @amylandthesniffers @amylandthesniffers ♬ original sound - amylandthesniffers

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