Personal | 2019 in Review; a year of loss, learning & expansion
This year was an absolute whirlwind for my little business. I shot 37 weddings all over the Midwest, hit a massive financial goal for being only 3 years in business, purchased a second company, and expanded my current one. (Although that’s still a secret.) I could run all the stats and say exactly how many shoots I did, but just know it was well over a hundred and I am exhausted. Purchasing a second company was a terrifying and necessary decision. I’m passionate about the wedding industry and small business ownership at large. I brought Something Blue Journal to Kansas City because it was a publication that embraces every facet of the companies it represents. With a beautiful, quality product to fall back on it’s hard to ignore, but with newness and shininess comes criticism and distrust. It’s a hard job, but one I needed and am slowly figuring out. Personal feelings aside, I’m absolutely confident in the publication’s success in this city, and I am elated for having already been embraced by so many talented vendors.
Personally speaking this year wasn’t the best. In April I lost my grandfather and not a month later had a huge falling out within one of my closest, most complex friendships. These two events put a dark cloud over the year, making the happiness over my trips and new puppy addition pale in comparison. The death has been painful to deal with, but the mutual parting almost harder. My grandfather died with a legacy and long life behind him, one of accomplishment and adventure. Everything has to end at some point, but he went having really lived a full life. The falling out was different; it left me feeling confused and frustrated and guilty. I’m still not sure how to process it and I still have nightmares about it, as if I’m mulling things over trying to figure out what went wrong. What’s worse is I can see it from both sides and I understand it needed to happen. However, the deliberate forced silence is perhaps worse than the chosen sideways friendship that preceded it. Grief is an amazing thing though, it has the ability to make you much stronger on the other side. It teaches you to be careful and certain and cherish what you have to the fullest. It teaches you to be patient and forgiving with yourself. And for the first time, in early December, I felt myself again - if only a little.
Being not just the end of a year but of a decade, I can’t help but think back to who I was 10 years ago. I would’ve been home from my first year of college, working at an ice cream shop; feeling not the weight of the 10 years prior, but anxiety for the 10 years ahead. It was the end of my adolescence and childhood. What was ahead was difficult and challenging and utterly beautiful. I wish I could go back and tell myself that for all the personal shortcomings, bad decisions, and wrong doings that I would confront, would be just as many accomplishments, moments of gratitude, and expressions of love. I would’ve never dreamed then that I’d be where I am today; able to live my life documenting moments for others - the celebratory, the fleeting, the poetic.
