For some reason, I think we grow up believing there is a schedule for becoming who we’re going to be.
You go to school. You pick a direction. You build a life. And eventually, somewhere along the way, you’re supposed to arrive.
Done.
This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what my life looks like.
Apparently, nobody told my life about that plan.
Because here I am, 45 years old, and somehow I feel like I’ve spent the last year starting over in about seventeen different directions.
I moved to Florida.
I went back to school.
Not just went back to school, either. I decided getting an MFA in photography sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing to add to my life.
I’ve learned about apertures and shutter speeds and lighting and composition. I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time in Lightroom moving sliders back and forth and asking myself whether +7 or +9 looks better.
I’ve made art about ordinary objects.
I’ve put myself in front of the camera and made art about myself.
I’ve walked around my neighborhood photographing birds, flowers, sprinklers, mailboxes and whatever else made me stop and look twice.
And somewhere in there, I started photographing people, too.
Then I became an officiant.
Because apparently we weren’t doing enough new things already.
I performed my first wedding.
Then another.
I started building packages and writing contracts and figuring out retainers and mileage and websites and advertising and all of the other things nobody mentions when you say, “Hey, I think I could do this.”
And suddenly I had this little photography and elopement business that didn’t exist before.
None of this was part of some carefully constructed five-year plan.
Trust me.
There was no vision board.
There was no notebook labeled My Mid-Forties Reinvention.
Mostly there was just me saying, “Hmm. I wonder if I could…”
And then doing it.
That’s probably the part that has surprised me the most.
I think I spent a lot of my younger years believing you had to know what you were doing before you were allowed to begin.
You needed the right education.
The right equipment.
The right experience.
The confidence.
You needed to feel ready.
At 45, I’m beginning to suspect that ready is mostly bullshit.
Sometimes you just start.
You buy the camera before you know what half the buttons do.
You enroll in the class.
You make the website.
You answer the message.
You show up to the wedding with your little ceremony script and your camera bag and think, Okay. I guess we’re doing this.
And then you do.
Not perfectly.
That’s another thing I’m learning.
Starting something new when you’re older is weird because you’re old enough to be very aware of everything you don’t know.
When you’re twenty, you can run headfirst into something fueled almost entirely by caffeine and unreasonable confidence.
At 45, my brain is more like:
Have we considered the approximately 742 ways this could go horribly wrong?
Yes, Brain.
Thank you.
We’re doing it anyway.
And maybe that’s the difference.
I’m not fearless.
I’m just getting less interested in letting fear make my decisions.
There are still plenty of things I don’t know.
I don’t know exactly where photography will take me.
I don’t know what my little business will look like a year from now.
I don’t know what kind of photographer I’ll ultimately become.
I don’t even know what I’m going to photograph tomorrow.
And for once, I don’t think I need to.
Because maybe starting over doesn’t always mean burning your old life down and building a completely new one.
Sometimes starting over is smaller than that.
It’s letting yourself become curious again.
It’s trying something you’re probably going to suck at for a while.
It’s discovering something you love that you didn’t know you loved.
It’s allowing yourself to change your mind about who you thought you were supposed to be.
It’s realizing that the person you’ve already spent decades becoming isn’t the final version.
There are still more versions.
More things to learn.
More things to make.
More ridiculous ideas to try.
More chances to say:
Hmm. I wonder if I could…
And find out.
So, no.
I don’t think I’m starting over.
I think I’m just still becoming.
And turns out, there isn’t an age limit on that.
