I turned 60 this year, 2022 and after the past few years with COVID, it was really hard to ignore what my inside was telling me, “Your life needed to change”.

I was born creative. My mom’s side of the family all had some level of creativity from singers, instrument players, and painters, she had 7 siblings and I got a combination of it all. I was at the top of my class in art in high school and college. I studied fine arts, architecture, and theater design and when I went back to school at the Art Institute of Chicago in 98, I studied interior architecture, graphic design, and web design.

I took to web design really well and made it my career for the past 24 years. It’s afforded me a life I never pictured for myself, but with it came my ability to consume stuff. It felt great, to buy cars, clothes, big trips, and being able to help my parents out in their old age; I never pictured myself being able to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for everything that life has given me, it’s more than I had expected, but inside, there still was an emptiness that wasn’t being filled.

I, like many of you, didn’t come out of Covid without scars. I suffered depression, my job fell apart, and was forced to leave. After 9 months of job hunting, I found another job, that is currently falling apart. I started to think about moving out of the Bay Area and when I dug down deep I didn’t think just a new location would be right.

The camera allowed me to go places I normally wouldn’t. Observe people in their environments and take photos that spoke to me.

When I think about the times I felt most fulfilled was back in 1999 when I purchased my first digital camera. In high school I did a lot of photography; weirdly I didn’t pursue that as a profession. I took the camera everywhere and got back to my roots of doing close-ups of plants.

In 2002 I started to travel with my first trip to Alaska and Italy and discovered a passion for travel photography. I explored buying camper van to travel around, but I didn’t see a way to make a living, I didn’t have the faith to put one step in front of another. It’s sad how decisions made out of fear can have lifetime repercussions.

So now here I am, at 60, and making the steps to fulfill my dreams. All the stuff I accumulated has weighed me down for far too long. My parents have both passed and without that connection, I have no one to prove myself to anymore, there’s no excuse to live my life the way I see it to be.

I was always meant for the “Road less traveled”, but now it seems I’ll be traveling it with lots of other campers and I’m good with that.

I leave you with one last thing, and I think Mary Chapin Carpenter says it best “Don’t be late for your life”.