We took a different route back to our Airbnb in Portugal.
It’s been about four weeks since my backpack was stolen and later returned by a kind stranger, sans all electronics and my beloved camera-and-lens combo. Four weeks of mourning moments I had documented over a six-week stay in Switzerland with a sweet family.
But the truth is, I’ve been mourning for a lot longer than that.
I didn’t quite realize it at first. In many ways, I still carried on, but in the ways I know myself to feel alive, a part of me had lost its way. When the hard drive holding years of my photography work gave up the ghost, a certain numbness crept in. A numbness that wouldn’t allow me to feel the world, let alone capture its beauty.
In the two years since that hard drive died, I probably picked up my camera a handful of times.
It was in Switzerland that my camera and I connected again. And then she was gone too. Two years of mourning the loss of my work in images, and now mourning the camera that had documented the last four years of nomadic travel.
That alternate route back to the Airbnb ignited something in me: a childlike wonder, a giddiness at the sight of a lamp post’s shadow.
A few moments later, the shadow of the lamp post was joined by the shadows of workers carting strips of metal and tools away from a nearby construction site. I was mesmerized. As the scene evolved and shifted with their activity, something stirred inside me.
Joy was being reconstructed in my soul.
The joy of capturing stories again. Of creating art. Of birthing ideas that have been dormant for far too long.
I almost talked myself out of sharing these images. I told myself that the phone captures would be seen as inferior, that they didn’t belong. I’ve battled fears of ridicule, imposter syndrome, and the paralysis of perfectionism for longer than I care to admit.
But I’m putting those fears exactly where they belong, behind me, as a reminder to hold on to joy, even when you are forced to change the way you normally experience it.
Reconstructing Joy is a collection of five images from the moment that brought me back to the joy of capturing moments. It is available now on Escape Prints.
