Three Paths, One Thread

I picked up a camera the way some people pick up running—not because I was good at it, but because I needed to be outside my own head. Wedding photography taught me light and composition, but it also taught me something stranger: how to be invisible in a room full of people. How to wait. How to notice the moments that happen in the gaps between the ones everyone expects. Years later, I'm less interested in perfect exposures and more interested in what a photograph remembers that I've already forgotten.

"The best photographs aren't the ones you plan. They're the ones that happen because you were paying attention when no one else was."

Writing came later, and reluctantly. I resisted it the way you resist something that asks too much—more exposure than a photograph, more commitment than a conversation. But photographs kept leaving questions unanswered. The image of an empty chair doesn't tell you why it's empty. So I started writing essays that began with objects: a keyboard with faded keys, a second-hand suitcase, the corner of a room. Small, specific things that opened into larger, hazier territories. Failure. Belonging. The gap between who you are and who you thought you'd become.

"You don't write to explain yourself. You write to find out what you didn't know you were trying to say."

Once a month, a small group gathers in a quiet room. No agenda. No performance. Just an invitation to share a story—any story. What happens is difficult to describe to people who haven't been there. Someone begins tentatively, voice uncertain, and then something shifts. The room leans in. Not to judge, not to solve, but to witness. People cry. People laugh. Strangers become less strange. I thought I was creating a space for storytelling. It turns out I was creating a space for listening—the kind that doesn't need to respond, only to hold.

"Stories don't need polish. They need truth. And the only way to find the truth is to speak it aloud to people who won't look away."