Demotion/Promotion
April 14, 2023
I don’t know that I need to address my absence. On the off-chance, dear reader, that you’ve been wondering what’s happened to me or felt concerned for my well-being, I can only thank you for your thoughts. I’ll use the same canned excuses as others–there was a pandemic, there was coming back from a pandemic, there was sickness and there was heath but in the end there was just an unwillingness to commit to anything other than the barest of essentials just to keep everything together.
…and by everything I mean family. The last few years between when I posted last and now have been spent caring for the only thing that truly has any lasting meaning–family. We’ve had some incredibly difficult times to be honest, dear reader. We’ve had days where we all cried. We have days where it took all the energy we had just to get out of bed, or put on clothes or even put one foot in front of the other. We’ve had days where we just wanted to set the world on fire and watch it burn to the fucking ground.
That anger was only for us. It’s not for you to feel or know about, but what’s important to understand is that through that process we bonded together in a way that I always dreamed my family would. We were bound so tightly to each other that the collective well-being of each and every person in our family was the only thing in focus. Through that unity, love, strength and determination we weathered our storms together, truly believing that nothing else could matter more. It wasn’t like we didn’t fight. It wasn’t all fucking rainbows and unicorns–it’s been brutal and lovely and scary and overpowering and humbling. But we did it together and through that collective burden we found a closeness that now sits at the center of our family.
Through that lens, the world looks different. Lofty goals in life that once were these cornerstones of what one might view as a successful career suddenly felt empty and trite. The fighting to be seen or to be right felt pompous and backwards. The concept of live work/balance was placed un a microscope and magnified a million times and cracked under the pressure. All I could think was so much time wasted. So much time gone. So much time I can never get back just trying to make people who didn’t value me or my opinions happy for their 30 seconds of airtime that no one would ultimately remember.
Not that I haven’t been truly blessed to work with and for some truly lovely people, nor is it to suggest that the time spent working with or for those people was anything less than an absolute blessing. I’m just saying that that ratio is hopelessly skewed and all that time spent slaving away at all hours of the night and weekends and holidays, away from from the people I love, missing the important moments of their lives and all just to feel that reassuring pat on my head by some person who thinks it’s ok to wait until Friday at 5pm to call in a 3 days worth of changes-that despite the lies I told myself about the sacrifices required to continue the upward trajectory of my career or how this would be the last time I would allow it to happen just to agree to it all again the next week–was hopelessly not worth it. Not one minute was worth it.
And as I watch mediocre people, push, kick, scream, lie and cheat for position and status in a sea of their perfectly mediocre competitors speckled with fewer and fewer truly talented and gifted individuals–As I watch these flaccid opportunists climb on top of each other, scampering in desperation towards the top of a festering pile of other creatively impotent opportunists, all willing to say and do whatever they can to further their position on the heap, I know want nothing to do with it. I’m tired of being scared of what desperate people will do to climb over you if you have something they want. I’m exhausted worrying about the consequences of the lies that these people can tell and their willingness to do anything–however vile–in their desperate attempt to not be found out for being the simple ordinary untalented people they are.
When you understand what truly matters to you, walking away from status or position isn’t a demotion. It’s actually the other way around. It’s elevation, it’s elation–a true promotion. I only wish I had figured it out sooner.
Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon.