As inevitably happens every time I travel, I have arrived at the airport excessively early (I’m currently sitting at my gate and my flight doesn’t depart for another two hours). Not surprisingly, I’ve had quite a bit of free time to kill here at gate B12, and so I’ve been scrolling through my photos on Instagram for the last hour.
Despite being a photographer, this is actually fairly unusual for me because I don’t actually spend much time looking through the photos I’ve created. It’s a weird quirk of mine, but usually looking through my images gives me a strange combination of feelings that I’m both looking at those awkward pictures from when you were dressed in all of your embarrassing pre-teen glory, braces, terrible hair-cut, and all, and staring at myself in the mirror like snow white’s queen, self-absorbed in my own beauty. Generally speaking, I edit, publish, and move on.
I was looking through my photos today, though, for a specific reason, and it’s not just because I was bored. My purpose has something to do with the fact that tomorrow, I will have finished the first month of my 365 day project and so, to celebrate, I wanted to share which images over the last few weeks of this project have been my favorite to create.
Before starting, my expectations for this project was that although I might be stretched thin, as was the case this past week (more on that in another post), it would also push me in the best possible way. Being only one month into it, I can’t quite attest to any grand improvements, but I have learned a few things. And while this project has kept me on my toes, it’s also been very therapeutic. To wander in the woods and to once again how to learn to be more spontaneous with my creating is something that has been missing from my life the last year or so, and I’m glad to have relearned it.
Of those things I’ve learned, one of them is that I’ve come to realize my hybrid nature of being a logical creative. I have always know that there is a part of me, the artist side, that hates structure, loves to think outside the box, and is completely spontaneous. A side that could decide to get on a flight to a foreign country with less than 48 hour’s notice (and yes, I have actually done this before). However, because of my logical side, ask me to plan a party and you better believe it will be written in my planner, saved on my phone, and a spreadsheet created a month in advance. This part of me loves to plan my life out to the minutiae, eats her meals at specifically the same time every single week-day, and creates cleaning charts that more than likely angers my roommates more than helps.
While these sides may seem dichotomous, I have found a way to merge them in a way that actually works. Perhaps I am the first person to use a spreadsheet to plan out my 365, but that’s ok. Not only has it allowed me to make it through the first month without missing a single day, but I’ve done so feeling prepared.
So after making it through one month of this project, I decided to allow myself a scroll through my Instagram. While I still felt a twinge of the dichotomous vain-ness and embarrassment I always inevitably feel, I also felt proud of all of those images, both in their shortcomings and their exceeding of expectations. They are a solid foundation I have set this year’s project on, and that to me is worth being happy about. The next eleven months will be an exciting journey, and it will be an adventure until the very last day. The best is yet to come!
*If you wish to join me on this journey, you can follow me over on Instagram: @madelineshaynephoto.
Leave A Comment