Musings from My Desk: Pandemic
Notes scrawled on scraps & halves of paper. Half-formed ideas tucked into margins; my 2020 journal laid open, waiting.
This quarantine has been a lot of things for me, and I as I write my ideas down to share them with you and immortalize them for myself, I recognize that I’m just adding my voice to the loud chorus of other people, also talking about the virus and how their lives have shifted and changed during this time.
While the first two weeks were sitting in survival mode— constant client communication and monitoring the situation, the past week and a half have been extremely reflective for me. Lots of asking myself the “why” questions and “what” questions about life. Lots of dreaming of what the future may hold, and what I hope it holds.
The ideas have come in waves, sometimes a rushing surge; a riptide that takes me by surprise and pulls me out to deeper thoughts. Sometimes is just a steady incoming of ideas—what I wanted to be doing in a decade, where I want to live, who I want to be.
It’s a strange place, sitting here at the age of 23 and feeling like I’m too late on somethings in life. Feeling, already, stuck in a way of doing something. As I’ve been dreaming, I’ve recognized a fear in myself I thought I had mastered: fear of failure that leads to never taking that first step. Hell, I wrote an entire thesis on fear and yet here I am, two years later with that same fear still taking up space at my desk, hogging the coffee.
I’ve been trying to distill the ideas down, pull them apart, make them digestible and pragmatic.
What are my next steps? Where do I go from here?
***
I don’t want to come out of this pandemic only to get back to business as usual, lost in a sea of to-do lists and appointments on my calendar. I want something more meaningful and intentional than that.
I hope that I find my lane, carve out my space and hold fast to it. I hope I say more “yeses” to myself, and less to the things that do not serve me. I hope I go to the places I want to go, even though getting on the plane is scary. And I hope I stop treating other people’s roads to success as if they are the only options. Instead, I hope I follow the trail off to the left. The one that goes through the desert, winds about, and eventually takes me to that tiny casa in Big Bend I hope to someday build.
I hope I start writing more and sharing those words when it feels right. I hope I make a habit of choosing drawing over Netflix when I’m feeling bored or stressed. I hope I keep reading more. Because good writers read.
I hope, when all this is over, I have a renewed sense of focus about what direction I want to grow. I hope I’ve worked my way through my archives and organized all my old photos and finished up the projects I have in the works. And honestly, I hope I can confidently call myself a “documentarian” and “photojournalist” without feeling like a fraud because it’s been a while since that was my full-time focus.
***
My usually neat, rigid handwriting went out the window as I tried to keep up with my brain, writing my thoughts down as fast as I could. Five pages and two coffees later (and one night spent staying up until 3 AM) and I’m feeling like I’m on the edge of a sneeze. It’s the moment just before growth in the direction I want and it feels like it’s right there, I know it’s coming, and yet the waiting for that growth is uncomfortable and, at times, painful.
I’ve been trying to nurture that growth. I read a sci-fi trilogy. I wrote a song. I’ve gone through all of my old hard drives and made a folder of photos to be re-edited. I started an online course that’s teaching me old ways of cooking & hunting for food: spearfishing, cleaning your catch, using every part of the fish and cooking a meal for your family.
A year ago today I had just quit grad school. Maybe that’s where all this reflective energy is coming from; recognizing that just a year ago, I was in a whole other world, doing an entirely different something. Maybe it just took a year for me to get to a place where I could ask the why questions and give myself permission to get creative. Whatever the reason, I’m happy to be here. Excited to be here.
I think it’s a trap to assume we can only be one thing in life. And it’s dangerous to conflate identity with one’s utility. Outside of my job and what skill I provide the world, who am I?
I’m on a perpetual quest to answer that question.
Anna Claire Beasley is an adventurous wedding, elopement, + portrait photographer based out of Texas. She travels for the majority of all of her sessions, from across Texas, to New Mexico, California, Oregon, Arizona, Utah, Hawaii, and anywhere else there’s a story to document. Her work is grounded in the belief that photographs are about remembering moments + experiences and she makes it her goal is to capture how it felt so those memories can stay fresh for years to come.