critter appreciate post! featuring:

-the one & only baby rae

-deedee the fake sleeper

-rabbit, my bff

-baby in her new "no dogs allowed" fortress

-nik's fluffy pup, olive

-stat, a lost dog i safeguarded in my backyard for an afternoon

baby & i moved out of our apartment into a new home, the last picture is from today as we bid farewell to south broadway.

i took these portraits right when i moved in, 2.5 years ago. both of my closest friends had just moved away. i was fresh out of a 6 year relationship. i was leaving a home i had spent the past year painstakingly remodeling, dreaming of turning the spare room into a nursery as my ex & i were consciously trying to conceive a baby (sometimes not getting the thing you wanted the very most is the gift). on the day i was moving out of that home i found out that my dear friend, colin, had died. i got fucking shingles a week later (my doctor asked if i was under any stress lol). then, i finally booked my surgery date for my preventative double masectomy after three years of tests and screenings and biopsies and dragging my feet towards the inevitable. all of that in the first month here, can you believe it??

looking at these self portraits, you can clearly see it was a moment of trying to process all of the grief, the rage, the confusion. what i didn't know then was that this home would be a soft landing for me. that i would fill this space with great friends, kiss new people goodnight, heal from many surgeries, spend weeks making my first fashion collection in years, interview for big opportunities at my kitchen table, squeeze my cat goodbye as i left home to travel to distant places. i thought my life had ended but actually i was coming back to life.