This one goes out to all my fellow gypsy souls! Those of us who are blessed and cursed with wanderlust. Those who know the complete loneliness of picking up and moving away from everyone you know and love, but do it because your dreams pull you.
Something that I’ve struggled with most of my adult life is loneliness. It’s followed me around from the moment I left my home state of Kentucky after college. I moved to Chicago with one of my best friends and had grand plans of big-city-living with my BFF. It was going to be epic! Well, as life does, plans changed last minute and I found myself all alone in a crappy tiny apartment on the north side of Chicago.
Me looking out the window of aforementioned "tiny crappy apartment". Photo cred: Nolan Wells
When I say I was alone, I was ALL alone. I had a few work friendships budding, but those hadn’t moved outside of the office yet. Walking home from the train stop after work, glancing into the windows of restaurants, I’d see groups of people eating & drinking, and feel so alone and jealous.
While this time in my life is haunted with loneliness, it’s also filled with so much empowerment and self-realization. With time I found my people, “my tribe”, and even met my husband. Any adult woman who’s ever moved away from home knows how hard it can be to build brand new female friendships (especially if you’re a little introverted like me.) Actually, it’s REALLY freaking hard to make new gal-pals when you’re a grown woman in a new city.
Fast forward to when my fiancé-at-the-time and I moved to LA. Moving with a significant other certainly crushed the initial blow of isolation. We had a handful of mutual friends from Chicago and college who were here, plus I was busy planning our wedding so I didn’t invest much energy into finding a local BFF. My husband, plus our handful of friends, was enough to satisfy my social needs at the time.
A few years later, we decided to “move to the ‘burbs,” so-to-speak. I had the opportunity through my job at that time to telecommute full-time, and we were able to eliminate my husband’s 2-hour-a-day-commute. We decided to go all the way, and move to the OC.
We’d moved an hour away from the few friends I DID have, and started working from home. Oh, and guess what…the weekend we moved into our new place, I found out I was pregnant. Little did I know how much of a recipe for disaster that I had brewing.
Around my son’s first birthday, I’d really started to fall apart. I had made a tough decision to leave my full-time job, and pursue my photography career (way more about that here). I’d gone from working 50-60 hours a week and having a nanny, to being home with a toddler 2-3 days a week, in a city where we had basically no friends. I have never felt so lonely and isolated in my life. The move, career change and lack of friends, coupled with what I’m now certain was postpartum depression, started to destroy me.
I realized I had a great big void in my life: female friendships. I didn’t have a crew for “girl’s night out”. Nobody to go see the latest cheesy chick flicks with. I was so lonely and felt so lost. I had my husband, yes, but a girl needs girlfriends too!
In my efforts to fill this void I started “mom dating” in the mommy group meet-up scene, which I found to be terribly uncomfortable. It’s so hard to talk to a stranger and get to know them, when your kid is whining and you’re overwhelmed with anxiety.
At one particularly embarrassing point, I even decided to post a “personal ad” in the local Orange County Moms Facebook group. I’d had a long conversation that morning with my best friend (who lives 2,000+ miles away), about how I was so sick of feeling this way. I figured there was no harm in letting it all hang out. “So what if a bunch of strangers on the internet think I’m lame”, I told myself. Well, 229 LIKES and 111 COMMENTS later, I realized how 'not lame' I was and how terribly universal this feeling is.
I had recently started attending local meet-ups with fellow photographers, in the hopes of making new friends while growing my portfolio. It was actually at one of these meet-ups when I discovered boudoir photography. From the moment I downloaded the first memory card from that shoot, I was in love. No other genre of photography had ever sparked my passion quite like that. The hair & make-up. The lingerie & wardrobes. The self-acceptance and empowerment. It seemed like I’d found exactly what I needed. A genre of photography that stole my heart, while also giving me just what I needed in life – to be surrounded by strong, brave women.
I suppose you could say that I’ve decided to take the reins, and form my own tribe. When I say that I hope each one of my clients walks away with a new friend, there's a whole lot of truth in that statement.
To those of you who are in the same place and reading this thinking, "OMG, yes, that's me!" Don't hesitate to drop me a line! ;)