My second home in North Carolina belonged to someone who makes miniatures. The owners were in Egypt, and I was here, living for a little while among the things they'd made and collected.
There was a dollhouse, floral wallpaper, a stained-glass light. So much to look at. As a photographer, I love being in a place where someone's personality is visible. I notice the rooms and the objects and start wondering about the person who chose them.
I didn't know their whole story. I just got to spend time in this small piece of their life while I was figuring out mine.
At the first house, I needed to reset. I had spent a lot of time resting and grieving. By the second, I was starting to feel curious about what I wanted to do with the freedom I had.
Being alone was making me realize how often I'd organized my life around a relationship. I'd spent so much time considering what someone else wanted and what our life was going to look like together. Now I could make a decision based on what interested me, and I was finding out how unfamiliar that could feel.
What did I actually want to try? What had I been putting off? What made me excited when I gave myself enough space to notice?
I was using ClassPass and taking all these different classes. It gave me a way to try things and figure out what I actually enjoyed. I was making time to be a beginner and see what I wanted to go back to.
Apparently, one of the answers was aerial silks.
I took my first class at Cirque de Vol on September 3, and afterward I wrote, “First timer and I already signed up for another!”
That pretty much says it. I found this thing I was so excited about, and I wanted to keep doing it. By the middle of September, I was already talking about it like this whole new passion I'd discovered.
I have spent a lot of my life researching things I want to do. Saving ideas, looking into them, imagining what they might be like. Here, I was actually going. I could sign up for a class and show up as someone who hadn't done it before. It was scary, and then it was something I wanted more of.
I like that I didn't know this about myself before North Carolina. There are probably so many things I would love that I haven't tried yet. That's part of what I mean when I ask how much life I can fit into one life. I want to find out what else is out there that might make me feel this way.
The house was giving me ideas, too. I had an ivory silk nightdress with the vintage tags still attached, and I started imagining photographs and video in these rooms. Sitting on the floor near the dollhouse. Doing something in the frame. Letting the room be part of what was happening.
I wanted to make something editorial that still felt lived in. I was thinking about how a photograph could sit beside a moving image, and how to let the strange little details of a place lead me somewhere creatively. Even planning it felt good. I was noticing things and wanting to respond to them.
I also started thinking more seriously about bringing my YouTube channel back. One video for each state felt manageable. I could collect the little things as they happened and give myself time to understand what belonged together. I wanted room for beautiful images and for being real and silly. Both are part of how I experience things.
Meanwhile, there was still work to do.
I finished a wedding gallery on September 4, and it felt great. I booked a boudoir session and another wedding, this one on my birthday next year. I'll turn 27 that day, a year after starting this project.
Those things helped me trust that I could keep working while living this way. A finished gallery mattered. A new booking mattered. I needed the income, and I also needed to see myself following through. I was building confidence through the ordinary parts of running my business from wherever I happened to be staying.
I'm still learning how to balance all of it. I want to experience the place I'm in, take care of the animals, keep up with my clients, make my own work, and have time when nothing is expected of me. I can make that into a lot of pressure if I'm not careful.
There was also a really hard part of this stay: I had to take a dog to be put down. I hadn't really thought much about that possibility when I started house-sitting, especially it happening this early in my trip. I don't want to gloss over it when I write about everything else that happened here. That goodbye is part of the story of this house, too.
Alongside that, I was still grieving the life I'd left. I still missed my own dogs. I still had money to think about. There were things I felt free from and things I missed terribly, sometimes on the same day.
But I was enjoying my own company. I was choosing things because I wanted to do them. A class became something I looked forward to. A dollhouse became the beginning of a shoot idea. Finishing work made the next stretch feel a little more possible.
The words I used at the time were, “I'm gaining back me.”
I keep thinking about that. I want to know what I like, what I can do, and who I am when I give myself enough room to find out. At this house, I was beginning to answer some of those questions.
I've already signed up for four more aerial classes for when I come back to North Carolina. I'm so excited that I get to keep doing this.
