I'm brave and other BS. (on how I really turned to family photography)

The punchline: I’m not brave, I’ve just got a kite that needs wind. Now let’s backtrack.

A year ago I woke up after two years in la-la-land.

I was hit with the sobering thought that we’d settled in a place where I’d never find work in the area in which I’d trained. (My father’s cautions were well-founded.) My ‘dream’ had been to become an assistant professor in research psychology. And those positions are about as rare nowadays as flying unicorns.

I have zero clinical psychology training, and clinical training is a real selling point. Heck, I didn’t even have a psychology B.Sc., having instead wiled away my undergrad years dabbling in computer science, zoology, philosophy... my favourite course in 3rd year was “Lives and Societies”. I studied crickets, naked-mole rats, poison dart frogs, rats, and fruit flies... But never humans, until my PhD. So, hm.

The short version: I was unemployable, though with a solid CV. Like having an uber-fancy kite on a planet with no wind. I hung around the local psychology department, teaching courses, working 9-5 at the shared adjunct office, and hoping for a lucky break. Two years later, I stopped dreaming.

During this whole time, I had also been applying for administrative positions, any and all research associate contracts, and even online translator gigs. Heard nothin’ from nobody. (But wait, I promise, my CV was solid!)

I’m proud and stubborn, so one day I’d had enough. And then I turned to photography. From photographing my kids to photographing families and weddings and people I didn't know.

When you feel the need to tell me how brave I am, or how inspiring my journey is, I’ll tell you the plain truth: I had no other choice, really.

I’m not “taking a leap of faith” (or maybe I am, in the way you leap forward in Frogger, when the log you’re on floats all the way to the edge of the screen and you’ll fall in the water if you don’t).

Since I am proud and I am stubborn, I - to continue with the odious metaphors - kept hopping and leaping and found the logs or otherwise managed to tread water, and made lemonade from those lemons, and found the silver lining, and went with the flow, or maybe it was against the grain...

And so far, I like where I landed.

Finally. My kite’s taking off.

Oh, and here is a photo of me, at a stairwell junction, on one of my first paid gigs as a family photographer (Distillery District, Toronto):