The Return of Me

It was October 2019. I had just finished selling my entire photography setup (every camera, lens, and flash I owned - everything but the tripod) to use the money to buy a high end Sony camera with just two lenses.

It was a move made in desperation. Instagram’s algorithm had effectively stunted my professional growth, I fell out of love with what I was shooting, and quite frankly, I was on the brink of walking away from photography altogether. Everything was riding on this new camera. I was going to change my style and finally shoot in the moody, cinematic fashion I had been wanting to shoot in for years, to no avail. 

A friend and I went on our annual fall trip to test the new camera out on the foliage and mountainous beauty of upstate New York, where I subsequently got a speeding ticket on the way home. 

The speeding ticket really bummed me out, but the shots showed promise. It wasn’t exactly the style I was going for, but I was much closer to my goal than I had been previously. 

I ended up going on two uninspired yet relatively successful shoots that winter, but cold weather tends to drains my energy. My depression has worsened with each passing year since 2016, so it doesn’t take much to kill my ambition these days. Add in freezing temperatures and complete darkness by 4:30pm - staying indoors was overwhelmingly more preferable to going out and shooting aimlessly.

Like with most things now, I procrastinated. I put my photography on hold, telling myself I’d pick it back up again in the spring when the weather was friendlier. I told myself that in late February of 2020. 

By the second week that March, the world was in complete shutdown.

I know some people did, and still do, downplay the severity of COVID-19, and view people like me as hypersensitive, overly-cautious, reactionary, pussified clowns - but when you see bodies being stacked up in freezer trucks, because city morgues ran out of space to sufficiently house the corpses; when you get up every morning for the first two and a half months to hear that anywhere between eight hundred to a thousand people lost their lives the night before, in the state in which you live; when you see dystopian images like masked up toddlers at the grocery store, or nurses in full protective gear using their break time to cry, it tends to fuck with you mentally.

I have no regrets about how I’ve handled the (still ongoing) pandemic. Every move I made at the height of it was made with an over abundance of caution, rooted in the idea of not wanting to infect/possibly kill my loved ones, or getting a severe case of it myself and losing my sense of taste and smell on top of possibly being put on a fucking vent.

So no, I wasn’t gonna eat outdoors and put a picture of the meal in my stories. I wasn’t gonna go on “socially distanced” dates. I wasn’t gonna whine about how we needed to reopen the world because MuH FrEeDoMs, and I certainly wasn’t going to roam the streets of New York, taking public transportation to get around, or otherwise surround myself with complete strangers in a city that was at one point, the epicenter for the deadliest pandemic in a century - all to take pictures that get 300 likes max on Instagram these days.

Not to mention my depression was already at its peak before the pandemic had effectively paralyzed me. I simply wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do anything even remotely creative.

But now, as I write this with one of two Moderna vaccine shots in my body, with the world slowly but surely reopening safely after a year plus of both human and economic devastation, and with the worst of it behind us, I’m ready to get creative again. 

I can actually feel myself returning to who I used to be, at least somewhat. Although, I’m not gonna be as happy as I was back in 2015/2016, pre-depression, when my photography career was trending upwards. When I was getting invited to fashion week events held in intimate SoHo apartments with literal Victoria’s Secret models walking around. When I was hosting brand-sponsored meetups in lower Manhattan. When my dating life existed, and I was 20 pounds thinner, waking up next to women I absolutely had no business waking up next to, if you believe in the concept of “leagues.” When the idea of The Apprentice host being president was merely fodder for late night television shows, and not a dark reality.

I know harping on the past is never healthy, but it’s hard not to, given how these past five years have been both for me personally, and for the world at large. I’ve seen very little daylight since the glory days of my recent past - but I do have one thing right now: My health. Something I took for granted up until this past year. 

Despite some career setbacks, I’m still relatively young, I’m hungry to create again, and thankfully, I have my health. 

And oh yeah - I still have that Sony camera in my dresser drawer, eagerly awaiting its return.

And return it will. Just like me.