How I Learned To Keep Dreaming

When I was a little girl, I loved to create stories in my mind as I ran through the fields around my house, imagining I was part of a grand adventure or a quest of discovery. I would reenact scenes with my sister in poofy 80’s hand me down dress up clothes, or with my cousin as we explored what felt like the endless woods around her house. Whether I was the princess (usually the case) or an adventurer discovering new lands, the only thing that mattered to me was the story and my love for imagining these tales.

As I grew older and playing “dress up” became a thing of my childhood, I tried many times to figure out how I could continue to bring these stories to life in another way. All my attempts at writing or drawing these scenes always fell short of my perfectionist aspirations and so I often gave up out of frustration, the scene incomplete and untold. More and more, the stories that came to my mind were dismissed from my mind, until I no longer paid them much thought at all.

This is not to say that I stopped being creative and pursuing the arts. Creativity is such an intrinsic part of who I am, that I could never leave the part of me behind. However, as the years went by, I began to focus more on dance, music, and art classes, where I was told what to do and how to do it. I enjoyed my lessons and the things I was learning, but I realized that because the source of inspiration were my teachers, or sheet music and choreography that had already been written, my creative pursuits always fell short of truly lighting the same fire I had felt as a young girl running through the woods.

It wasn’t until about six months prior to graduating from university, when I was introduced to the work of Alex Stoddard, that I was able to once again find my fire and my passion. There was a way for me to tell my stories. Like a dam breaking, all the scenes and stories I had trained myself to ignore came rushing back to my mind in a vivid whirlwind of imagination.

I felt alive spending the remainder of my weekends in Utah exploring this new world of conceptual and fine art photography. I had finally found the happy medium of perfectly recreating these stories and allowing myself to explore and to experiment.

After three years, I have never once looked back from the world of photography. While I recognize three years is not all that long, right now photography is my passion and the source of tremendous happiness in my life. To share my world with people, in a way that is so real and believable, helps me to deal with events that are not always in my control and to share my magic with everyone who stops to join the adventure. Because of photography, I have learned that anything is possible if I just give myself the time and the patience to figure it out. In my mind, it is an adventure worth having.