I had a blog back in the days of Xanga. Remember that? I loved putting together sentences and getting my thoughts out of my head. There was no pressure. Not from anyone else and not from myself. I could just write whenever I felt about whatever I felt.

Maybe you’ve noticed–maybe you haven’t–but I haven’t been writing a lot on here lately. At least, not a lot of personal stuff. Somewhere along the lines of starting my business a few years ago, fear started creeping in when it came to writing, to real, honest writing. I cannot pin point when or how it came, but most of the time, things are not that black and white anyway. All I know is that when I write, I seem to only gravitate towards the candied version of my life, the gooey, sticky, sweet parts that everyone loves.

I’ve been digging into this and trying to come up with the why. And I think I may have finally figured it out.

I am passionate about photography. I’m in love with everything about it; the feel of my camera in my hands, the composition, the settings, the click of the shutter. The process of making the photo is equally as delightful as the final product itself. And I realized that I’m scared of admitting failure because, when you love something this much, it would be a horrible, awful thing to lose.

See, about the time the fear started creeping in, so did the comparison issue. You will always hear stories about those who had 3 weddings their first year of business and then 35 their second year. But you don’t hear the stories about those of us who plug away, growing slowly, but steadily, without any explosions. I half expect a magically BOOM to fill up 40 weekends of my year with weddings. And when it doesn’t, I think, what am I doing wrong?

My days are not always magical. I doubt anyone’s are. I email, cull, edit, upload, backup, practice… But here’s the thing, when I was little, I would go out in the yard and pick dandelions for my mom. When I would bring them in to present to her, she would fill up a little glass with water and proudly place the dandelions right in the center of the kitchen table as if they were a bouquet of beautiful pink peonies. In reality, they were weeds, of course, but she was still proud of them.

And I’m thinking that what has happened to me is that I have come to expect magical bouquets of pink peonies to be delivered to me every day and I have forgotten to be proud of the hard work I’ve done, of the long way I have come in 2 short years, of the steady growth that has come not by a big boom but by a daily focus to keep getting better…of the little bouquets of dandelion centerpieces.