Trails, Tribulations, and Tissue Paper

nniajo
Feb 14, 2020
6 min read

Have you ever written out a to do list and immediately started feeling overwhelmed? Maybe you wrote out your bill list then looked at your paycheck and questioned how the hell am I supposed to do this? This is life, at least what I’ve experienced of it, you’re trying something and figuring things out. Trails and tribulations, the test you face in life to see if you’ll make or break. To feel overwhelmed before you even begin is not the best foundation to build on, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start. No matter how long the list is right now, it’ll only continue to grow unless you start taking things on so you can proceed to checking items off. Facing them, trying them, going for them, believing in them. Everything seems impossible to someone until they see it done.

Doing a photoshoot for my birthday was a task I was supposed to challenge myself with every year since I started my company, or at least the studio anniversary, but I didn’t do either. It’s not that I didn’t have the means or the skills, I was just being lazy and let me just say giving in to laziness is the death of dreams. I didn’t feel like doing it, even though my goal was to have the time space and to do so, but when I had the opportunity to complete ‘the dream’ I sat on my ass. I still wanted it, or so I told myself, and I was going to do it, another sweet white lie, but it just wasn’t going to happen today. ‘I’ll start tomorrow or maybe next week, better to start fresh.’ It’s always easy to start tomorrow or after the weekend, but trust me when I say tomorrow’s turn into next week, and next week turns into next month and then before you know it it’s been over two years and where are you with the progress? Still at the start because you haven’t just done anything to get you past the first step. But let’s be honest, that first step is terrifying, it’s intimidating and demeaning and all the self doubt starts to surface. ‘What if it doesn’t work, what if I’m judged, what if I try and try and I’m still stuck, what if I’m just not good enough’. Questioning yourself is never the best, we can be our own worst critics, but sometimes it can work in your favor. Use your mind to manifest and go after it. Often times we like to consider the worse that could be said instead of believing the best. Sometimes we decide we fail before we have begun to go for our goals in our own minds and that’s more defeating than not attempting.

Feeling defeated can motivate you or it’s your hindrance, depends on how you decide to face it. Loosing my mother made me realize this was the reality of obstacles. How could the most amazing creation, with the biggest heart and the purest soul leave this earth and I not feel defeated. How am I supposed to go on without her? Who’s going to support my crazy ass dreams now?? Who’s going to be my sound board to make sure I’m not crazy??! How the hell do I do life with Geneva??! She left me here, in her house, without her. For a time I let myself go into darkness, I didn’t feel I had any reason to aspire for my dreams anymore. The dream was the dream, but the goal of these dreams were for her, she was the dream. So I could succeed and take care of her and now she’s gone, so where does that leave me? I felt so utterly lost, I felt nothing, I was just broken. Hitting breaking points are not always the worst part of the storm, in my experience it’s the brink of the horizon. ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn’ and all that jazz I know, but think about it, when you have reached your breaking point it means you’ve given your all, you’ve done all you can and now it’s nothing left but you and your faith. That can be a glass half full, half empty argument in my opinion. On one hand you feel defeated, but on the other you have nothing left to lose. Thats the good news, you tried, and yes you lost, but you gave it your all, you did the best you could. So why not try again, you know what happens if you go this way, but what’s to happen if you go left instead of right this time? Stop stressing and take the lesson. You have knowledge now, you have experience, you have more then you had the last time you were down here, in fact since you made it so far the first time, you’re not even as low as you think. So don’t take being knocked down as a loss this time. It’s just time to change the path. It time to start, time to try.

This shoot was inspired by another photographer/model that does all her own work as well. While I scrolled through her images she quickly took my breath away, then I saw it, the perfect birthday photo. I quickly screenshotted the image and sent it to friends ‘I’m going to do this for my birthday shoot’ while some were supportive others began to play the question game. All the questions of how are you going to do that, who’s going to take them, when are you going to have the time?, you know all the ones I was already saying to myself. Before I knew it the doubt started to settle in. How was I going to do this? How am I supposed to make a big enough flower, my inspiration post is a petite model. How am I going to get the angle I want and when the hell will I have the energy and time for any of this? So I started to give in a little, I mean I have a legitimate excuse, I don’t feel like it, I lost my mom, I’m depressed and just don’t have the time, I have to take pictures of schools and the babies so I can pay bills, I don’t have the capacity to do it anyway. All reasonable and logical but still something tugged at me. All the dreams the goals, you say you’re after, you fantasize and manifest but you’re not attempting to do anything. So as damming as it seemed I started my to do list, watching YouTube videos so I could gather some idea on how to complete this. Which that got me no where and ultimately I was yet again ready to throw in the towel. I mean no one has seemed to come up with anything like this before that made it seem possible to complete how can I do this with no reference point. I was working at a school when I saw a quote on one of the walls ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ as simple as it was it connected with me and suddenly I was tired of using excuses that made it acceptable for me to fail without ever trying. I mean I’ll never know if I can if I don’t, never know if it will work if I won’t. So I got creative. I took old cardboard from my office, bought an ass of tissue paper from Walmart and a few dozens of flowers from dollar tree and got to it. Everyday after work just one piece at a time trying to create something and before I knew it... I had figured it out. Felt like Tony Stark when he figured out the path to the quantum realm, ‘Shit’ it worked. I faced a few more challenges even after I had an outfit made and props completed. Every time I went to start I had to work or didn’t have privacy or the setup just didn’t cooperate but I kept pushing. Once I had everything done, I had managed to take over 330 images and then I found it challenging to only pick a few that I liked. Facing things in life often seems impossible on plenty of occasions, but if you just take it one step at a time you can accomplish what go you after. As Geneva would put it, ‘Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.’

Check out the TOP 15 images from the shoot below, some behind the scenes footage AND the creation of the space!

All available only a few scrolls away!

Birth of The Rose: Top 15