A Time of Gratitude
When I started as a photographer, I had no idea that journey I would one day embark on, and how much healing would take place.
The time of year is approaching where we think about what we are thankful for, both from the past year and years before. I started as a photographer doing senior portraits and weddings, and I do love that work. Both of those types of photography have their own special places in my heart. I’m grateful for what they have taught me and the bridges they built for me to grow personally and professionally.
The thing I’m most thankful for, however, is how they were primers for me to step into the world of boudoir photography.
I’ve talked about it a little here and there, but in case you didn’t know, I am a survivor of sexual abuse. While we hopefully accept in a universal way that sexual abuse is a terrible act of violence, nobody who hasn’t personally experienced it can understand what it does to a person’s mind, heart, body and spirit. It impacts every part of us.
To make it even more devastating, our culture carries so many untrue beliefs about people who experience abuse of all kinds. Often the blame falls on us. Even if it doesn’t, we begin to be viewed as “hard to handle” or there is a lack of understanding as to why we feel and respond to things the way we do, even after the violence is over.
I felt a sense of loss of myself. I felt a disconnection with my body and my ability to trust what I knew. I responded in ways that sometimes I didn’t understand. And I felt very alone.
As I began my healing journey, I met other women like me, and we shared our feelings and experiences with each other. While all of us were and are uniquely different, there were common threads that brought us together. In listening to them I felt a sense of healing, and I know that in hearing about mine they knew that they were not the only ones struggling with the aftereffects of what they had been through.
Boudoir photography allowed me to ask what it takes for a woman to reclaim herself from all that threatens to disconnect her from all the pieces that make her who she is.
In the sessions with my clients, I feel intense gratitude for the ability to create the safe space that I so often needed myself but did not always get.
I’m also grateful for their trust in me to hold this space for them, to guide them and to show them a part of themselves that they were told was taken or damaged by another person (it never was… the beauty in us can never be taken away, especially not by the hurtful actions of someone else).
I’m thankful for the ways I’m able to grow and strengthen as a human being through pouring myself into work that is meaningful for me and creates powerful, lasting change in the lives of other women.
There is strength in all of us that we cannot always see unless we first see it in another person like us, and beauty in us that we cannot always appreciate unless someone helps us to see it.
For those of you who I have worked with on this journey… and those of you I will work with in the months and years to come… I am thankful for you.
