The worst has happened…
Ok…
I am being dramatic… The worst would have been that my hard drive was stolen…
Or dropped in a puddle…
Or dropped over a cliff…
Or run over by a fourteen wheeler…
As it is my hard drive just completely stopped working…
Sometimes it will show up on my computer…
Sometimes it will open and let me see my pictures, but I am not allowed to move them…
Sometimes it will let me think it is going to let have all the pictures I have taken over the last four and a half months… but then it doesn’t.
When I first saw that something had gone wrong all the ways I could have better prepared for this came to mind… thoughts of how incredibly irresponsible and stupid I am for taking this risk with something so important to me. What kind of a photographer doesn’t have a backup hard drive? (A pretty terrible one I would imagine)
I was (am) pretty upset about it…
After all the name calling and the crying I shut down the panicked sad part of Katie and began thinking of all the positives.
- I actually went all those places in my lost pictures.
- The last four months happened and I will always have them in my memory.
- Some of the pictures are online for me to look back at any point.
- I still have seven adventurous months before me.
The truth is I am 21 years old and out doing what I am able to do in order to better the world in any way possible… In the meantime I am being stretched and bettered myself… Maybe for my betterment I needed to loose something that I was holding onto with the whitest of knuckles… Maybe I needed to stop comparing my work to the work of the photographers I see on my newsfeed. Perhaps the insanity of fighting off fear of not entering the world of success was too much for me and I needed to check my motives.
It was time for an incredibly painful sacrifice…
Success died.
I went to a store in Cambodia today to buy a new hard drive. This home for all the photographs of my next adventures will be new. I am going to start over and this time I will be doing so with a different mindset. Marketing won’t always be on my mind. My future won’t always be the first thing I consider before my shutter releases…
But Rather…
I will seek to tell the stories around me for the true blessing of being a voice that is able to speak.
I will take photographs of the things that scream from my very soul instead of the things I think will get me noticed by the “right” people.
I guess you could say I lost… and I won…
I get to keep going. I get to live a story. I get to keep seeing.
I have no photo’s for this post.
All for now from the heart of a storyteller.
