Journal

Boudoir blog posts have been getting added and never published. Photos would get uploaded and the stories I wanted to share along side of my images never arrived. Over a years worth of photography sitting back logged on hard drives and a silent photographer. The combination wasn’t good. I wasn’t silent because we closed down or I took time off, just the opposite. I was so busy with two clients 4-5 days a week that the blog, the last little bit of business I didn’t need help with…or the last little bit that I refused help with; has sat here, untended to. I have a girl who does our retouching. I have Jess, who does everything I do when I can’t do it because I am with clients and I have Dessa, who not only does makeup for me but other photographers as well and has her own business, I also have Lauren who cleans up my messes, literally and figuratively by keeping the floors swept and shit organized. The last thing I wanted to do was hand off the blog to someone else. Using prewritten copy seemed so cold. A ghost writer seemed like pissing in the wind. So the pictures never saw daylight while they waited for me.

The world has virtually stopped spinning. We all know what is happening out there right now. Life is uncertain. People are scared. We thought we were isolated before and now we are having to stay home. My body hasn’t seen anything that isn’t elastic waisted in over 2 weeks. I have 9lbs of spaghetti noodles in the pantry and I can’t eat gluten. My teenage sons might not see the inside of a classroom until Fall. The studio is closed until April 3rd and even then we don’t know what the local government is going to mandate for small businesses. So we wait. This drop dead gorgeous woman is also a local business owner and like all of us in the non life sustaining fields, we don’t know what to tell our clients and we don’t know what to expect for ourselves. I am going to fight tooth a nail to hold onto The Girlfriend Experience. The new studio space is still under construction and I have no plans to slow down but that doesn’t mean that I won’t have to enforce new policies and create new boundaries in the business and in the studio. I find it hard to believe I haven’t sat down and written a blog in over 3 months and I find it surreal that it is basically illegal to work right now. Wasn’t everyone saying 2020 was going to be “THE YEAR!”? I am not ready to write it off just yet. With all hardships come lessons. With lessons come realities and some of my realities are that my priorities haven’t been set properly for some time. I’ve shared about my depression issues last year, which have come with me into this year. I have been one foot in front of the other, my chin has been down. I am focused on the task at hand and that alone. I walk into the studio and I work. I leave the studio. I get my work done. I take care of my kids. Check boxes. But checking boxes hasn’t prepared me for this. I suppose nothing really could have prepared me for this, none of us could have been—this is unlike anything we have seen in our lifetime.

I am still here. I just haven’t been doing the things I should be doing. This is going to change. I don’t know when I will be back to shooting but we will keep you as updated as possible. May is at capacity. It is past capacity. So lets hope we get this curve flattened and we can get back to living a bit more of a conscious life and hope to see more normalcy.