Cross posted from my intern blog over at LeahandMark.com

To make up for my lack of shooting during my vacation last week, I decided that I would be my own punishment.

I’m not the easiest subject – I hate being on that side of the camera, have very few good angles and a lot of bad ones, salt and pepper hair, uneven skin tone, my nostrils that don’t match (size or shape) and I have scars from a smooching incident with a Pekingese when I was 5. All this, with the addition of trying to light myself and focus when not behind the camera made for a perfectly painful challenge.

I was probably at it for 45 minutes before I tweeted:

Trying to do something and sucking wildly at it.

I kept at it. Moved the flash closer, leaned in, turtled my neck, stared at the lens, *click click click*.

Eventually, I arrived at these, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s not every day a picture of me is taken that doesn’t make me shudder, and this alone is one of the reasons I love photography and want to learn from Leah and Mark. That feeling? I want other people to have it, and I want to be the one who gives it to them.

We all deserve to feel beautiful.

I jumped headlong into adulthood at 18, when my mother had a stroke sometime during the night before midterms my senior year.

When I was 21 my mother passed, my father following suit two years later (devastating coincidence, I assure you it was not from a broken heart), and I was on my own.

I went to college for a while but at heart I was one of those kids that was never meant to be there – I was meant to be in the real world learning by experience. So, I’ve been in the technology sector for 20 years. Thank the typing class, thank the man/woman competition my older brothers instilled, thank my natural desire to learn and create. Whatever the cause, I’ve made a survivable, mostly enjoyable living as time whipped past like the Shanghai Maglev, and find myself jolted back to the heart of my youth – and on the cusp of 40, I’m applying for an internship.

The photography internship is with talented locals Leah & Mark and will happen in the gray area of my abundant spare time (*cough*) with supplemental help from leveraging PTO days. I might learn to shoot more efficiently, effectively and consistently, I might find my footing and cement my style. I might come to see my worth and start accepting compensation for my work, I might learn to see (and note) shoot locations, I might learn to embrace editing and become proficient at it. I might also suck the chrome off a trailer hitch on this one, and spend the next 6 months sitting in a corner rocking with a vacant look in my eyes, trying to pretend it never happened or that I never cared.

Might, might, might. I don’t know, and that’s what makes the future great.

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” – Helen Keller

What I hope for is beyond the given benefits of an internship – it’s that I latch on to the glimmer of a youthful dream in my heart, a spark I’ve suppressed/ignored/neglected – and turn it into a bombastic nuclear freakin’ explosion in my soul that can’t be denied or extinguished.

It’s hard to follow your dreams if there’s no one to catch you when you fall – and maybe that’s what my 20’s and 30’s and losses and heartbreaks were teaching me all along: that I’m capable of catching myself, and that what’s worse than failing to achieve your dreams is not chasing them at all.