I mustache you a question.

A few months ago, my preschooler had a week in his class dedicated to celebrating "city heroes." He told me that doctors, firefighters, police officers, mail carriers, and waste collectors all had important roles in our city. I've never been a fan of people who don't practice what they preach, but this lesson really got me thinking about how often people tell kids about everyone playing different roles in society, but it seems like it never stuck to the now-adults. As many of you may have noticed (and maybe even felt sorry for me at times), somehow, all my hobbies, passions, and aspirations have put me in situations where people are always questioning what it is I'm going to do next. They even sometimes slip in the encouragement of asking when I'm going to do something "real". I never understood that.

I was a nurse assistant and everyone asked me why I wasn't a nurse.

I declared an art major, and people asked me if I thought I'd ever "be a real artist", or even better, "switch to a real major".

I was working at galleries, museums, and labs, and they asked me if I was going to get a real job.

I turned to Education, and they congratulated me for finding something to do with my "fake" art degree, then wished me good luck on finding a "real" teaching job.

I became a nanny and people say, "Don't worry. You're young; You've still got time to find a real job."

A "real job"-- Has everything I've been doing been some sort of crazy dream that isn't actually reality? Was I not actually getting paid to do any of this? What was I missing?

We teach our kids that everyone has an important role, but our children pick up on this kind of talk. We are their role models, whether or not we want it to be true. What if your child decided to become one of those things that you've mocked once in a while? What do you think they're going to think of themselves for doing something you thought was silly?

I don't know. I guess I'm asking that maybe next time you're at Thanksgiving and want to make fun of your nephew who decided he was going to move across the country to become an actor, don't. The next time you want to joke to your friend about how fake his cleaning job is, don't. The next time you want to encourage that nanny to become something "better", please don't.

Doctors are not better than their nurses and nurse assistants. Can you imagine how little things would get done if doctors didn't have their crew with them?

Teachers are not more important than nannies. Just picture how much more enriching it is for the child who has a teacher at school, and a teacher for a nanny.

Structural engineers are not better than the artists who design the aesthetics of the building. Engineering is important, but if it doesn't look good, who's going to buy the design?

A band is not more talented than its sound tech. Your guitar and voice wouldn't actually sound good without your sound crew.

A father who works is not better than a mother who stays home. Remember how much work you wouldn't get done if she weren't with your kids? Yeah.

So can we please try to be adults and quit thinking that we're somehow better than another group of people? Can we begin showing kindness and gratitude for people who do things you would and probably could never do? Please. Teach your kids to work hard in everything they do. Teach your kids that a bigger salary doesn't make you more important. Teach your kids to take care of their health. Teach them to persevere through all the stresses that come with any career. Most importantly, teach your kids to be kind.

I got sidetracked on this post. What I really wanted to say was that my fake BFA and fake Master’s degrees had somehow accrued real debt throughout the years. And today, 17 months after I walked at graduation, all my fake jobs paid those loans off.

Look at you.

Three weeks ago, I noticed you posting photos of your journey through this cancer and I told you if you ever wanted someone to photograph you to document this season of your life, that I would be more than happy to do so. You told me you would love it and asked me to photograph anything and everything whenever I came to the hospital. Looking back at this now, I don’t know why I ever thought this was a feasible idea considering I leave my house at 6:20 every morning and get home at 7 (or 8 or 9 or 10) every night with my work schedule. I came on weekends, though, and the last time I came to photograph you, you had me transfer the photos from your phone onto my laptop. Did you know you were going to leave 9 days later?

I’m sorry that the one weekend I didn’t come visit you was the last weekend you’d have in this life. I know you don’t want me to feel bad, but I can’t help it.

I made the slideshow video that played at your funeral today. 150 photos isn’t enough to show just how big of an influence you were-- as a teacher, husband, father, brother, and coworker. If you don’t believe me, this picture was taken at least 14 years ago. 

Today, 19 of the faces that were with you in this photo showed up to your memorial service, and your funeral, and your burial. That’s so weird to say, by the way. We (your former students) were talking about it today, and you never picture attending your old Sunday School teacher’s graveside service-- at least not until they’re like, old and cripply, you know? But even then, there really aren’t many teachers out there whose students would show up to their funeral after 10 or so years of not being their teacher. It’s just uncommon. But what can we say? We just loved all the crazy voices you had when you read us Bible stories. We applaud you for your patience with us when we got distracted and off-topic during your lessons. And of course, we’ll never forget how cool we thought you were for being the first person we knew who owned a handheld PDA that had a stylus.

Anyway, I know you wanted me to photograph anything and everything, but honestly this was such a difficult task. There is no easy way to go about photographing a person at a hospital, or people at a funeral. It’s just awkward. And people stare at you, even when you actually have permission. I remember about a month ago when I found out about your cancer, it was around the same time that I was asked to photograph a memorial service for a baby. I remember sending a text to someone saying, “The most recent Google searches on my laptop are ‘How to Photograph a Memorial Service’ and ‘Gifts to Give Someone with Cancer’. What has my life come to”. Needless to say, it’s been a crazy month.

Though I wish that your #SenJourney would have ended differently, on this side of eternity, here are some of those photos (mourner-friendly) documenting the past few weeks.

During my internship as a high school photography teacher, I designed a curriculum whose goal was for each of my students to propose his/her own photo project idea and plan of execution that results with the best set of photos that represents their theme/idea and the amount of work put into it. The idea was to try to get them to be more “creative”. Creativity has more meanings than one in this case, but that would be another blog post if I were to get into that. Anyway, you would think the idea of “my teacher letting me pick what I get to do” would get the students to jump for joy, but the initial excitement was short-lived as soon as they realized they had no clue how to come up with an idea, or the opposite problem was having too many ideas that they couldn’t narrow it down and decide on a specific one, let alone how to execute that idea--- discouraging indeed, but not surprising.

As a teacher, I had to find a way to not overwhelm them with all this freedom I wanted to give them, so the road to Creativity was a gradual one. I started with a project that gave them pretty strict guidelines with some room for creativity. The next project gave them less guidelines and more freedom, and so on and so forth until the very last project gave them the least amount of restrictions and the most amount of freedom. Now this curriculum was a big success for me, and I am positive that the students gained something from it, too. I would have wanted to leave it at that and just give myself a nod of approval; However, as a Master’s student, I was required to have proof that this was actually successful (or not successful)...otherwise I wouldn’t have graduated...HA. So this was the tough part: I had to come up with a way to measure the students’ success. If you’ve ever been an instructor in the creative arts field, please tell me you understand how terribly difficult this is. You and I both know that after all the technical critiques, yes, art is objective, but we can also tell whether you’ve worked hard and are showing progress or are just showing us plain bologna and trying to pass it off as “art”. After a lot of research, I finally found one way of measuring creativity-- two of the categories in this being Quantity and Trends of Originality. In photography terms, here’s what this meant:

Quantity: Take more photographs. The more photographs you take, the better understanding you will have of the topic you’re trying to translate into a photograph.

also means:

Quantity: Spend time on your photographs. The more time you spend on your assignment, the better your final result will be.

Trends of Originality: Once you have a great idea, stick to it. If you get frustrated, instead of changing it completely, find a way to slightly alter it in order to better represent your thoughts.

For each project, I had my students record how many photographs they took, how much time they spent on the photographs, and how many times they altered their idea without completely straying from the original. For just about every student, I found that the predictions were true: The Quantity and Trends of Originality of the beginning projects were much lower than those in the later projects, and the students stated that the later projects represented their creative ideas much more than the earlier ones where they took less photographs and spent less time developing the ideas. The students were also much happier with the results in their later projects.

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I’ve spent a lot of the past five or six years trying to convince people that the skills practiced in the arts are something that can and should be applied to just about anything in life. I truly believe that the arts are so relevant in so many things. Take a look at my life, for example. Right now, I am a Nanny. This is not the career that I had thought of when I started college. In fact, you could say I was like one of my photography students when I first graduated High School: People told me I could do whatever I wanted with my life, and the idea at first was amazing, but it quickly overwhelmed me. I literally wanted to do so many things.

I wanted to learn to bake.

I wanted to be a CSI.

I wanted to be in the darkroom.

I wanted to make jewelry.

I wanted to be one of those baby doctors that get to deliver cute babies all the time.

I wanted to make mini movies.

I wanted to get married.

I wanted to teach.

I wanted to be a mom.

I wanted to work in the Emergency Room.

I wanted to make burritos at Dos Amigos.

I wanted to be an interior designer.

I wanted to get paid to taste test.

I was the student that couldn’t narrow down what I wanted to do with my life. Honestly, it was scary to have all those choices ahead of me at 17 years old, and because I had a difficult time deciding, I just noted that one of my goals in life was just to help people, and nurses help people. Since I was already taking a Licensed Nursing Assistant course, my school counselor advised that I had a good chance of getting in if I applied to colleges for Nursing because it was a very competitive field to get into, and it would be better to get in, then decide to leave, rather than not get in, and trying to apply after the schools already got their pick. So that’s what I did. I applied to just about all the nearby schools that 1) offered Nursing, 2) was on CommonApp, and 3) had no application fee (broke broke broke). I was accepted to several that I wanted to go to, a lot that I had no interest in, and to UNH, which was the cheapest way to go and ultimately the winner. Fast forward to Orientation Day, in a cramped room full of incoming Nursing majors, I decided, “You know who else helps people? Art teachers. Art teachers helped me, so I’m going to keep helping myself by making art, then help others make art, too.” I switched my major. So things like this kept happening where I went from one idea, and kept altering it from there. I know-- it’s hard to follow, but bear with me and try to grasp this for a second. Remember how we said Trends of Originality was taking an idea and sticking (slightly altering) with it?

My Trend of Originality Timeline went like this:

Idea: Help People

High School Courses: Film | Drawing |Jewelry | Ceramics | Photo

College Major: Nursing

New Idea: Help People/Make Art

Major Change: Studio Art

Job: Licensed Nursing Assistant

New Idea: Help People/Make Art/Teach Art in School

Major Change: Fine Art (Education Track)

Additional Jobs: Photography Lab Technician | Substitute Teacher

Add Summer Job: Temporary Nanny

Internship: High School and Elementary School

Add Job: Regular Babysitter

Add Summer Job: Summer Art Camps

New Idea: Help Kids/Teach Art

Add Job: Nanny/Homeschool Teacher

New Idea: Help Kids/Teach Kids

I think I might have anger issues.

I’m not talking about the throw-everything-across-the-room-when-I-get-“k”-as-a-text-message or the I’ll-start-cursing-up-a-storm-when-you-finish-the-ice-cream-that-I-bought kind of anger, but the kind where if something makes me upset, I stuff those feelings in and then shut myself out in order to keep myself from doing those things. But the thing about living with anxiety is that your brain doesn’t function the way it normally does, and it blows things up out of proportion… so you get upset more easily. This is exactly what it did this weekend and I did what I would normally do, which was shut people out… Except I did this to a greater extent that for over 48 hours I didn’t let anyone know where I was, I shut all forms of communication with people, and really just ignored all the people who cared about me. This was really, really, REALLY stupid, and I sincerely apologize to everyone who tried to get in contact with me. I honestly had no idea how my actions would affect other people, and I didn’t think that so many people would care so much about my whereabouts because I have a hard time believing that there could be so much love out there… for me.

I have a really difficult time understanding the concept of love. I mean, I don’t really have a problem with loving other people, but it’s the acceptance of love that I struggle with. Having grown up in a home where “I love you” was the reason I wasn’t allowed to sleep over a church Youth Leader’s house, “I love you” was the reason my baby sister wasn’t allowed to spend time with me, and “I love you” was the last thing my father would say to us before he hung up the phone and then spend time alone with a woman who was not my mother, you could say that the term “love” became very disfigured in my head, even when I didn’t realize it at the time.

These days, I often find myself running away from people when they get close to me, which I wrote about in a previous post. As soon as things get good in my relationships, I get scared because I know in my head that I’m going to love those people more than they love me, and so I begin to push them out, and most of the time, I don’t even realize when I’m doing it. I sabotage my relationships because I start believing that people don’t really love me, and instead of finding that out myself, I would rather kick those people out of my life before they have the chance to hurt me first. Do you know where this concept has gotten me so far? It’s gotten be alone on the streets in the beginning of the new year so that “I wouldn’t have to be around people”. Crazy? Yes. Because those people that I didn’t want to be around included people who absolutely care about me, and even when I didn’t give them an explanation for why I left for no reason without communicating to anyone, no one told me I was selfish, which is what I was expecting to happen. Instead, what I got was “We love you,” and at that moment, I found myself sinking that in. I knew that these people meant it, and that I really had no reason to think otherwise even when I wanted to come up with a few.

Now, I don’t normally have a New Year’s Resolution that I’m motivated enough to actually work on for an entire year, but considering my first few days of 2015 were pretty destructive, I want the rest of it to be different. Drastically different. From this day on, I really want to work hard on accepting love from other people.

I don’t want to keep blaming my past, my parents, or even stupid diagnoses for these issues.

I don’t want to stay so guarded that I don’t let relationships grow.

I don’t want to keep shutting people out.

I don’t want to be sabotaging my relationships anymore.

I don’t want to be the person to whom the people I love are dedicating this song.

I’m ready to give it my all this year, and I would have never come to this place if it weren’t for the people in my life who haven’t let me push them away no matter how hard I’ve tried, knowingly or unknowingly. These people deserve trophies. Seriously… you are the greatest people in my life and you have no idea how much you are appreciated and needed.

Working in the Alzheimer’s wing of the nursing home was always really hard. It’s difficult to imagine that someone, over time, could just forget about many (if not all) of the important events in their lifetime, the people in it, or even the things they did five minutes ago. They forget about their age, who they’re married to, and sooner or later, how to feed themselves or use the bathroom. Although this was difficult to be a part of, the residents seemed to have no problem with their disease at this point, because as far as they know, they don’t have one. In fact, the most difficult part for them was the transition stage—you know, knowing that they have a problem but not knowing how to fix it? As in, they recognize their son, and also are aware of the fact that they don’t know who their son is. It must be a terrible feeling and I would never want to be in that position. But right now, although I can’t underestimate the feeling Alzheimer’s patients get when they are at that transition stage, it is the only thing that I feel like I can compare my situation with. Right now, more than ever, I don’t feel like myself. I want to stay in my bed. I cry. I cry a lot. I cry in front of my classmates. I cry in front of strangers on the bus. I want to do mindless things like watch reruns of How I Met Your Mother. I want to drop out of school. I don’t want to talk to people. I can’t motivate myself to do work. I miss class. I only want to be around people who know what’s going on with me. I don’t want to be around people who know what’s going on with me. I’m IRRITABLE. I’m IRRITABLE. I’m IRRITABLE. I would say no to food if it meant I didn’t have to get out of bed.

I attended a workshop on collodion, taught by one of the most influential people in the photographic world, France Scully Osterman. It was really something else to be at a place like Anderson Ranch, around other artists who see the world sort of on the same wavelength as you. I absorbed every minute of it.

Being 2,300 miles away from everything I was familiar with was completely terrifying at first. Having to go on a plane for the first time in 13 years, and having to do so by myself was more nerve-wracking than I ever pictured it to be. Seriously, it was so awful (though the ride back wasn't so bad). Then I started meeting people at the ranch. I went to explore the city and a few caves with my roommate and her friend who I had only met an hour earlier. I went to a concert and a fancy bar/restaurant with people I had met at lunch. Then on my last night, those same guys from lunch and I decided to go on a spontaneous hike to the top of one of the many mountains in Snowmass, then stayed up talking til almost 4 in the morning with other ranch scragglers we made friends with that night. I couldn't believe myself. It started to seem crazy that I never even had a second-thought about going to a college that wasn't a 25-minute drive away from my house. Why did I choose to stay in Little Ol' New Hampshire when I could have been thrown out of my comfort zone and forced to actually talk to people and hang out with them if I wanted to live a normal, somewhat social life? I feel like I always have a fall-back plan here, and that was what I needed three years ago. Here I don't need to meet new people or make new friends because I already have them. Years ago I couldn't emotionally handle being anywhere that wasn't familiar and all I wanted was consistency. At least that's what I thought until two weeks ago. What I never realized is that I have been the consistency all along, but everyone else's lives here have moved on. If two people get on bicycles and one person rides off and the other one doesn't move, the distance between the two bikers only get bigger. If that one biker had started going at the same time the other biker did, the distance would have been the same the entire time. Right now I feel like the biker who got on the bike but never moved because I wanted consistency when all of my friends wanted change. Maybe that's why I feel so distanced from everyone.