Vol. 10: Notes on a Difficult Personal Year

growth, transformation, failure, defeat... and hope

Self portrait. 2020.

Oh, hello. It’s been a minute (12 months) since I’ve sent a newsletter.

I’ll blame it on this year. It’s been a rough one: the end of a nearly decade-long relationship, the return of a chronic illness, a freeway car wreck, personal malaise, societal malaise, existential malaise, etc., etc. I have also entered the final year of my 30s. (Another lap around the sun, which, by the way, will someday die like the rest of us.)

If I am being generous, it has been a year of growth and transformation; if I am being bleak (see sun, above), it has been a year of failure and defeat. It is all of these things, depending on the day.

I want to be introspective about all of this, to provide some sort of insight or wisdom or takeaway, but it’s hard because I am still on this journey of growth, transformation, failure, defeat. I know I’m heading somewhere, but I don’t know where. If my life was a movie, I’d be in between scenes — the moment of pitch black before whatever next emerges.

One thing I learned studying creative writing at the University of San Francisco is that it can be difficult to write about what you’re currently going through. It can take months or years to get to a point where you have enough perspective to understand how something has changed you, and even longer to put it into words . “Distance frees us of our former ego’s vanities and lets us see deeper into events,” writes memoirist Mary Karr.

I’ve been thinking about this — about distance, and about how certain events alter the course of your life, even if takes some time and space to find out how — in the context of photography, or more specifically, my journey into photography. I became a photographer because of a motorcycle trip.

In 2018 I set out from San Francisco to Washington, DC on my 650cc motorcycle, an orange Suzuki V-Strom named Clementine. It was a bucket list cross country road trip, in a time of introspection. I’d been working as a writer and editor in the University of San Francisco marketing department and felt adrift, unclear about my future, uncertain about the meaning and purpose of my life. I thought I wanted to be a creative writer.

Me and Clementine. Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, 2018.

I was in the university’s MFA in writing program, where I took an array of classes in both fiction and nonfiction; I wanted to dabble, to find a style that suited me. (I took the same approach to courses in college, which is how I learned to play the Irish tin whistle. But that’s a story for another time.)

Unfortunately this dabbling backfired because by my second summer I didn’t have a viable thesis — a book-length project — in either genre. While my classmates were waist deep in sci-fi space epics and heartbreaking memoirs, I had accumulated a handful of (terrible) short stories and (passable) essays. My first thesis idea, a novel, had failed to materialize. It was crunch time. Without a thesis I wouldn’t graduate. So I came up with an idea: I’d take my bike across the country and write about that.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about long, solo roadtrips: They’re boring. I mean, it wasn’t all boring, not the porn star party, or the UFO convention, or the Buddhist monastery, or the conversations over tea with the Joshua Tree nudist. But I also remember being sad and bored, alone for hours, days, weeks, in some Motel 6 (Motel Sex, a trucker joked) on my first ever extended road trip in what sometimes felt like a strange and hostile country. I only talked to strangers. I took phone calls with my therapist at gas stations.

I wish I had taken more pictures at the porn party. Los Angeles, 2018.

It didn’t feel right — this was supposed to be a big adventure. It was a big adventure! I mean, who plays basketball with porn stars and then goes to eat tofu with monks? Two things can be true at once. I was having the time of my life, and also having a really hard time. I was uncertain of myself and my abilities as a writer, my ability to make meaning with words, to pull off a whole thesis, or at least an approximation of one. I was lonely. I was tired. My neck and shoulders hurt from gripping the motorcycle’s throttle and battling the wind and the weight of my expectations. I didn’t know how to make sense of all the things I was seeing and experiencing. I wasn’t having any epiphanies, bursts of creativity, marathon sessions of inspired typing.

My once-in-a-lifetime trip — the grand American road saga that was supposed to fix everything — felt like a failure. It felt even more so when I finally did gather my bits and pieces of observation and anecdote into a Word document and submit it a semester (or two?) late. What did I learn? What was the point? What did any of it mean?

What I couldn’t have known then is that this trip did change the trajectory of my life — and for the better. Because I’d brought a camera with me. As a side project I was photographing people I met and places I saw. I learned the power of visual storytelling, and the intimacy and responsibility it takes to make a portrait of a stranger. This almost off-hand foray into photography was my introduction to photojournalism, which would become a vocation, a vessel to some of the meaning and purpose I had been seeking.

Learning to make portraits. Mario. Los Angeles, 2018.

But before I figured out any of that, I was muddling on in the darkness — making my way from one scene to the next. I didn’t have enough perspective to interrogate my moves and what they meant, to trace the lines from failure to future. I didn’t have the distance to see deeper into events.

This year, I am in a similar place. I’m in the confusing muck of an unfinished journey. As the year nears its close, I wish I had something to say about it and what I’ve learned and where I’m going. But it’s not that time yet.

That’s okay. As I think back on my motorcycle trip, I see hope for the future — even if I don’t know what it looks like yet. I look forward to finding out, in time.

Here’s to 2026.

Gratitude List

Of course, it hasn’t all been muddling and mucking. Here are things I’m grateful for this year.

• My Eat, Pray, Love Trip to Japan and Guam. I’m 20 years late to Eat, Pray, Love, but it was a great book!

  

  Hirosaki, Japan, 2025.

  

  Hagåtña, Guam, 2025.

• My friends and family

  

  Frenz. Atlanta, 2025.

• Lagoon, my forever foster dog (who might end up being my forever dog?)

  

  ❤️

What I’m Reading

• I am on a Joan Didion kick. I’m listening to The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell on audiobook, and reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

Some Photos of the Year

And, lastly, here is some of my work from this tumultuous year.

Jimmy Carter’s final funeral service. Plains, Georgia.

Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration parade.

A protest against ICE.

Mahendra Patel, 57, at a bond hearing. He was later cleared of attempted kidnapping charges.

Typewriter Tom, who has some 1,000 typewriters in his collection.

(Please take a look at the feature story I wrote and photographed about Typewriter Tom.)

More year-end photos to come on Instagram.

Thanks for reading. Tell me about your 2025.