It's a relief to have a real camera now, instead of a point-and-shoot. The results are so much more satisfying.
Summer is usually a big long period of reflective thought, for me. A lull. What the hell am I going to do when I'm a part of the real world and get two weeks of vacation a year, tops? That'll be fun.
I've been thinking back to my past selves and musing upon how distanced I feel from them. I was never the kid who wore her search for self on her skin. I wore what felt right, nothing crazy. No statements, just a nice shell. I didn't go through those phases. I was never a punk, or a skater, or a goth, or even one of those middle school nerds (I was nerdy, but not in the same way). I did start listening to Sonic Youth and Elliott Smith in seventh grade, but that's something else entirely.
Instead of trying on different clothes, I tried different outlets of expression, different modes of being. Nothing ever seemed to stick. I read a book every day in elementary school, absorbed in fantasy worlds, devouring anything that fell into my lap. I miss that. I played sports - soccer and then basketball and then softball, for five or six years. It stopped being fun. I used to write poems everyday; I used to think in verses, stumbling upon couplets in the middle of the night. I wanted to be a writer, but my stories petered out and died in the middle, and the characters never had the ring of truth. I stuck with poetry longer, but I don't do that anymore. I remember when that was "my thing." My teachers would coo over them and praise me, have me read them aloud (while I died of embarrassment, seriously), submit them to contests. I was good. And then I just... stopped. I didn't know what to write about anymore. I was smart enough to know that my angst was dumb but too young to have anything substantial to write about.
Impasse.
I played piano and then violin for six years, but as with everything else, I just kind of hit a wall. I was good but nothing more than that, and I didn't enjoy it enough to be more than that. Our house is full of the flotsam from my attempts at self-actualization.
Eventually I found photography, and I think that's the one that's stuck. For eight years now, I think. I think it allows me to look for what my poetry was getting at all along - capturing a moment, evoking a visual, restructuring a sublime mental image. The paralysis I felt with everything else - the inability to fully express what I meant because of my own limitations or because of the medium's - is generally eliminated. Photos can be a halfway point between reality and theory, and I think the constraints inherent in the medium make it more challenging and fun.
I don't know, but I think I've found it. I can't think of a medium of expression that would better suit my personality, or something I would be happier doing for the rest of my life.
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