I have a friend who tells me that my work is very different from other photographers’ work – so different that while it catches attention, it leaves people wondering what to do with it. She is right, I think – even *I* don’t know what to do with it all the time.

Much of my work is comprised of the intimate details, the pieces of things, the raw emotion found in the smallest moments. Some of this is because many of my subjects and locations over the years have required me to “shoot around” things that don’t belong in photos – and some of this is just the way I see. Whatever the explanation, I have developed a style that apparently doesn’t immediately resonate with people – and getting noticed – and hired – is becoming more of a challenge.

On the one hand, I suppose this is a victory. I am differentiating. I stand out. But I am not a “safe” photographer. I don’t look like the big names who are reaping the benefits of the trends they’ve created, and my voice is very unique. My niche is small, limited in a way to amazing people who want to be creative, who value uniqueness, and who want to feel the way I feel them through my photography.

But it is what I hold in the other hand that leaves me wondering if I should keep going with all this. The “you are worthless” feeling that shattered me this week when I faced the reality that my business can’t even compete for a *free* wedding that I want to shoot. The “is this because I am having a baby?” and the “I had more queries *before* I relaunched my brand and portfolio” and the “you are utterly dispensable” that has been my wound for more years than I can count.

My therapist/midwife tells me I need to write “affirmations” for myself. Things to say to myself that will bolster my confidence and keep me living my best life. My honesty won’t allow me not to engage the discouragement, though. I don’t process things by letting them roll off or sweeping them under the carpet with an “it will be okay” mentality. I process by saying it out loud, looking it in the eye, and breathing through it.

This spring, I thought I was building physical endurance for giving birth to my new baby, but I am realizing that *this* is the endurance I am building for her birth and for my life: a way to look at the pain and to let it be what it is instead of lashing out against it and letting bitterness and disillusionment give me my identity. I may not be organized with my breathing in the yoga-type bonding exercises that make sense to a lot of people, but I know how to exist in the rise and fall of pain, and I do know how the intensity of it will fade and I will still be coming to life on the other side.

It has been an incredible April. This photo is just a tiny preview of what is coming, amazing collaborations that are awaiting processing and publication. It is the best work I have ever done, and I am still working and waiting and taking deep breaths as I go. I do believe that my time is coming and that what I am creating *is* worth something – I am not going to let the “labor” make me quit before the life comes.

There are moments in my photography career that will always, always haunt me. They’re the moments that my nightmares are made of, the ones that can still reduce me to tears and panic attacks, the things that no amount of creativity can redo, because sometimes, even in photography, life is just life and when you blow it, you BLOW it.

I’ve been careful not to make mistakes – everyone is, I think – but being human means that they are going to happen, and you hope they happen on personal things, so that the only person they affect is you, so that you can merely re-tool your vision and move on, even if you’re disappointed.

But inevitably, there’s going to be a big one that reaches farther than you and your goals, and after my trip to California, I have a new big one to add to my panic attack list. Of course it happened on my biggest shoot. The one that brought me into contact with some of the people I admire the most in the entire wedding industry. The one that *had* to be perfect.

I remember standing in the hall once after a wedding my friend photographed, years before I ever thought I would become a photographer myself. My friend was loading the wedding images onto his computer, and he had lost over half the images he shot because of improper file handling. I felt bad for him as I waited there while he tried to recover things, but I didn’t understand how *sick* something like that makes you feel until I lost one of my own destination shoots that way early last year.

It gives you PTSD. You’ve given something of yourself, shared something with a client or a model in front of your lens, thought you had earned something beautiful to bring home and give back for the gift of themselves that they shared with you – or for the money they paid you. And here you are left empty-handed, knowing that some things just can’t ever be recreated.

But I am learning is that something is better than nothing, and while sometimes the “something” is a hard-knock lesson in how to be more careful and how to get up and keep going as a professional, putting yourself out there and being real with your humanity is still worth it.

You don’t have to let your mistakes be the end of you. Just take responsibility for your mistake and take your next step. It’s not always going to be pretty. Your mistakes will not always be approached with grace. But you are bigger than that moment, and the people who can’t offer grace are probably not the people you were meant to work with anyway. Don’t be afraid of the growth that comes with messing up. You don’t know where the smallest things will take you, or when you will need the lessons you learn through failure.