Over the next thirty years, she turned it into a lush garden of probably a hundred species of plants, trees, and flowers. Inside the house, she keeps orchids in every color you can imagine. Every time she travels somewhere, she brings back shoots and tries to grow them at home. She can spend an entire day in that garden, quietly tending, observing, adjusting, as if she were in conversation with everything growing there.

I grew up watching her do this, and I am only just realizing now how much I’ve been learning from her through her gardening practice.

I have been living a nomadic life for the better part of the last fifteen years, which means that having houseplants was a luxury I couldn't afford besides the occasional succulent. Last year, my husband and I decided to try settling down in the French Alps. One of our first big decisions was to get an inordinate amount of houseplants. Neither of us had been able to do this before, and we were like children in a candy store, buying plants left and right. I had been dreaming about a succulent garden for years. He wanted a lemon tree. With every trip to the grocery store we would pick up something new.

I was giddy and joyful throughout this process. I would visualize our home just completely covered in plants, a beautiful contrast against the white walls. My first learning from that experience came fast. Getting the plants is step one. Keeping them alive is the greater challenge.

Living in France felt laborious, and I kept trying to push through, convinced the end result would make it worthwhile. Every task, every routine felt like it had a weight attached to it. I noticed the same heaviness in the plants. During that year of tending to the plants and learning about them, I had to watch some of my favorites die. Amongst them were my beloved succulents. As one of them died, I would plant a new one and learn about the conditions it needs. As time went by and I rotated my succulents, I learned something important: seemingly similar plants can have wildly different needs.

Just because a succulent has a similar shape to another one doesn’t mean that they like the same things. One needs direct sunlight, the other needs shade. One needs a little bit of water, the other needs regular nourishment. One likes rocky soil, the other one does better in softer, nutrient-rich soil.

My succulent project wasn’t a success in the end, and not for lack of trying. Only one of them survived, the strongest one of the batch. I couldn’t help but feel terrible about my failure to make something I’ve been craving for years a reality.

And then there was Giuseppe.

Our lemon tree, Giuseppe, started losing color in its leaves soon after we got him, looking sickly and malnourished. We tried to move him to the balcony to get more sunlight. But with the sun, he was also more exposed to the elements. A warm day of sun would be followed by a cold night rain, and Giuseppe was losing his vitality by the day. In the end, the place he could bear the best was by the window, longingly looking out at the balcony. It was a sad scene by all means. A once beautiful, Mediterranean plant, now a shadow of himself, sadly peeking at the outside world that couldn't provide him the conditions for a full, happy life.

Earlier this year, we decided to leave France and the Alps behind and temporarily move to the Island of Elba in Italy. By the time we arrived here, Giuseppe had only six leaves left. Those were the only leaves with some color that could photosynthesize. They looked almost comical on the empty branches. But I had faith that he would recover.

I put him outside on the patio, half shaded by some palm trees, surrounded by the other plants we saved from France. They all went through a period of struggle and adaptation, and once again, some just didn’t survive the change of scenery. I was most concerned about Giuseppe, though. I would watch him every day, as closely as I could, hoping to notice a little leaf starting to sprout.

For a month, there was nothing. His existing leaves grew bigger, and I could see hundreds of tiny light spots opening on their surface, working as hard as they could to take in whatever sun was available. I was worried it wasn’t enough.

And then one morning I was doing yoga out on the patio, moving through a sun salutation, when my gaze wandered to the plant. There they were: tiny red sprouts, so close in color to the branches that I almost missed them. And then almost immediately, as if they had been waiting for permission, hundreds and hundreds of little leaves began appearing. Within a couple of weeks Giuseppe was in full bloom. Every day I would go out, look at him, talk to him, and welcome him back.

Only then did the learning fully arrive.

Plants are just like us humans. At the end of the day we are all part of nature. No matter how hard you try, some places are just not going to be nurturing for you. Not because something is wrong with you, and not because you didn't try hard enough. Simply because the conditions don't match what you need in order to grow.

Maybe you need more warmth in your days, maybe you need less. Maybe you need long, sunny days so that you can soak it all up on the beach. Or maybe you need shorter, rainy days so that you can cozy up with a book and enjoy the feeling of safety in your own little paradise.

Because paradise means different things to different people. You might need daily connection with your neighbors, or you might just need them to leave you be and go about your business. Your needs might change throughout your lifetime. Nothing is set in stone.

But one thing is clear: if you try to force yourself to live in a place that is not nurturing for you, in an environment that leaves you longing at the end of every day, you will wither. You will be sad and closed off from the opportunities that you want. Because we are just like plants. We need an environment where we can thrive, feel supported and feel that we belong.

My mother understood this instinctively. She never forced a plant into soil that didn’t suit it. She read what each one needed and found it a place where it could thrive. I’ve been learning to do the same for myself.

I know now that I am not a one-place person. Transylvania is the place where I was born. It is where my roots run the deepest and where I feel most connected to the land and my ancestors. I know the light of every season there intimately: the smell of fresh snow before it hits the ground, the excitement in the air as winter starts turning into summer. Mexico is where I feel most spiritually alive, where I can speak openly about the things that matter most to me and be met with understanding rather than suspicion. The ancestral knowledge that lives within its people emanates from them in conversation in a way I have felt nowhere else. And Italy is where I feel I live most fully in my body: the warm Mediterranean sun on my skin, the taste of fresh tomato sauce and basil on a pizza that nurtures, rather than overwhelms my system.

Each of these places gives me something the others cannot. Together, they make up the garden of my life.

The most common judgment I encounter as a nomad is from people who don't understand how one place can't be enough. What those people miss is that we are multidimensional beings. We can have multiple passions, professions, and skills, and we can feel deeply connected to multiple countries and places simultaneously.

For some people, the place they were born is the most nurturing place, surrounded by exactly the people and conditions that make them shine. I have enormous respect for that. It is also true that for some people, the place they were born will make them feel like outcasts, as though something is wrong with them, when in fact the only thing wrong is the match between where they are and what they need. They will continue to long day after day for something that is just not available in their immediate surroundings. It is okay to recognise that. It is also okay to take the leap and go out into the world to find the place that will nurture them.

Setting off on this path hasn’t been an easy thing to do. It has its own unique challenges, and not every day is a great day. But I’ve become more fully myself through these experiences than I could ever have if I stayed in Romania. Giuseppe taught me that. A living thing placed in the right conditions doesn’t just survive. It will grow hundreds of new leaves almost overnight and flourish.

Find the place where you can do the same.

If you feel that pull toward a different life, a different place, a different way of being in the world, and you don’t know where to start, I would love to hear from you.
I work with people who are trying to build a life abroad in a more intentional way.
Reach out, and let’s see what your natural habitat might look like.

Cover art by Asa Gilland

When I was 15 years old, I went on my first overseas trip to Israel with my family. We traveled with a group of people, some of whom had amazing, professional-level DSLR cameras with them. I still remember the intense yearning to be able to hold one of those one day and take pictures with it. That yearning lasted for a good three years before I was able to afford my first entry-level DSLR, a Nikon D3100 with an 18-55mm kit lens. For anyone not well-versed in photography, that is the most affordable DSLR that was on the market in 2010.

Finally, the machine I’ve been dreaming of and dreaming with was in my hands, and I could go out and start shooting with it. I felt my success as a National Geographic photographer imminent. I started shooting away and applying to competitions immediately. Only then did I realize that what I had in passion, I hadn’t quite had in talent yet. I would have to become one of those artists who painstakingly takes the time to learn what makes a picture great. One of those who has to take a lot of bad pictures until they start making good ones.

Being a millennial and growing up with the message of instant gratification, this indeed was a hard road for me to take. With the advent of the internet and social media, I had an endless stream of great photographers showing up on my screen day by day. Photographers who were younger than I was, who came from more difficult backgrounds, and who were more talented.

The thought of giving up before even trying crossed my mind daily. But still, the pull was so strong that I just had to stick with it. I started taking my camera out daily, I signed up for courses, and I participated in open calls and competitions. The first thing I wanted to figure out was what I actually wanted to do with photography.

I was drawn to the streets of Budapest, where I was living at the time. The beautiful classical architecture and the millions of people going about their lives out on the street provided me with endless inspiration. So I would grab my camera and head out and just take pictures. My greatest inspirations at the time were the early street photographers, such as André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Brassaï.

I carried this passion for the streets with me when I moved to Malta in 2016. Day after day, I would walk the streets looking for subjects to photograph. That practice was what started my first documentary project. It wasn’t something that I planned intentionally, just a story that was unfolding on the streets, and I was there to capture it. As spring turned into summer, I noticed people moving their lives outside more and more. And by June, I experienced my first Festa.

What fascinated me most was how an entire community seemed to transform itself around a shared tradition, turning ordinary streets into stages for celebration, devotion, and connection.

Malta, the small island nation of about half a million inhabitants, has 359 churches. The largest city has close to 21000 inhabitants, and the city with the most churches has 20 of them. Needless to say, religion and traditions are important for the country. So when June rolled around, the towns were bustling with preparations for religious celebrations.

The Festa is a time when villages celebrate their patron saints, and in the relentless heat of the summer, take to the streets to have fun and enjoy the cool night air. As soon as I would finish my shift at the restaurant where I waitressed at the time, I would pick up my camera and just take to the streets. Every town had different decorations and had its own unique ways of celebrating.

Year after year, I would notice new elements, new saints, new traditions, and my camera became my best friend during that time. Being an expat in Malta, I often went out alone. Yet having my camera with me made me feel like I had a companion. Someone who saw the same things I did and who would help me remember and organize my memories effectively.

Out of that yearly practice grew my second, more ambitious documentary project. I had been involved in working with refugees in Europe since my time in Budapest. Volunteering and helping refugee women and their children learn English was an activity I would return to in Malta. Still, I was feeling a drive to leave the comfort of the small island and help create change with my camera on a larger scale.

What began as a planned trip evolved into a much larger project that would occupy me for the next two years.

With the harsh anti-immigration measures being introduced in the US in 2019, I felt a pull to take my practice out into the world and offer it in the service of a group of people who were strong and determined, but were constantly misrepresented in the media. Out of that yearning, my documentary project on Mexico was born.

That trip taught me more than any photography course could. One of the most important learnings was that determination and drive are just some of the elements of a successful project. Community and support are equally important. I learned this the hard way, while travelling from refugee shelter to refugee shelter and feeling like the problem I was trying to solve was insurmountably larger than I or my network could help solve.

My photography practice has become stronger, more intentional, and the element of service has become a central theme in it. However, without official backing and specialized support, I felt that I was trying to move a mountain with a spoon. I had the pictures, I had the story, but the magnitude of the issue and the desperate personal stories of the people brought me to my knees time and time again.

I was sitting down for breakfast and dinner with people who were running for their lives, who had to leave their family behind in the hopes of bringing back better opportunities for them, people who were sick and exhausted and who didn’t know where they would spend the following night. And every time I sat down with them, I learned something new about humanity. About the strength that lives in all of us. I saw them laugh and cry, I played with their children, and I listened to their stories.

Juan became one of my favorite people from that trip. He was a genuine, humble, and gentle Colombian man who left his little town in the Colombian Amazon and set out on foot toward the US to find a way to provide a better life for his daughter back home. His story was one of pure grit and perseverance, crossing borders at night through rivers, hiding from authorities checking passports in buses, and sleeping on the side of the road when he couldn’t find accommodation.

I met him in Guatemala City and was immediately taken by his kindness and determination. He recounted that after many months on the road, he got sick and, following a hasty abdominal surgery, he was kicked out on the streets in Mexico. When I met him in Guatemala, he was heading back home, hoping that at least he could escape the ordeal with his life and make it back to his daughter.

This was my first fully intentional project. It was also the project I needed to halt because of how much it was asking of me. It was a lesson in humility and listening to my intuition. After 9 months on the road, countless interviews and stories told, my heart could not take the human suffering I was encountering anymore. I learned that when you are pushing against the current, no matter how good your intentions are, you will burn out.

Although I stepped away from active fieldwork, the project itself continued to shape my thinking long after I returned home.

This process brought a bigger hiatus to my documentary practice. I tried my hand in other fields of photography, areas that I felt were easier to stomach, such as travel and interior photography. And though the process of taking pictures was still an important practice, without my heart in it, it was just not going to go anywhere. I needed the freedom to decide what I wanted to photograph and how I was going to frame the story.

So when I met my husband, I immediately knew that there was a story waiting to be told that only I could tell. This is my current, ongoing project, and it is teaching me the most about my documentary practice. It’s bringing my strengths and weaknesses to the surface and showing me where I can still grow. I am learning to sit with a long-form project, to practice patience, and allow things to unfold at a slower pace than I am used to in my work.

What connected this project to my earlier work was not the subject matter, but the people at the center of it. Whether I was documenting refugees crossing borders or musicians chasing an improbable dream, I found myself drawn to stories about perseverance, sacrifice, and the pursuit of something meaningful.

It’s also my most personal project to date. My husband, Sage Anthony, is a music producer, and two years ago, he embarked on the ambitious task with his musician friend, Leonardo Giuliani, to make a music album from scratch and record it at Abbey Road Studios. It was an urgent task in a race against time with AI-generated music flooding the internet.

I found myself right in the middle of this process, without any knowledge about levels, reverbs, or studio lingo. I just did what I always do when I am trying to make sense of a situation and unearth a story. I started taking pictures. And just like that, a new story started emerging. A story that I was so close to, I couldn’t see the edges of.

This is still my main project right now. It has helped me become a better storyteller, it is once again showing me my strengths and weaknesses, and is allowing me to approach a process I knew almost nothing about with curiosity and patience. The story of an album made by humans is the story of all artists trying to create today. It is the story of my own art. It’s the story of intention, patience, and perseverance. And I am learning all of this with my camera in hand.

Through years of showing up with genuine curiosity, I have developed a consistent creative practice that helps me orient myself in the world. And in the process, I created a body of work that tells the story of a life lived in constant conversation with the world around it.

Creativity is a path that gives back as much as you put into it. It’s not so much about the how but the what. What do you want to bring into this world that didn’t exist before? What do you need to understand better? How do you want to express your unique way of seeing the world?

Don’t overthink it. We don’t know how long we have here. Every day is an opportunity to create something that didn’t exist before and to learn something about yourself and the world through the process. Pick up the brush, write the chord, make the art that only you can make.

And if you already have it, share it here, I would love to see it!

I grew up in a society where being the best wasn’t only commendable, it was essential. After the fall of communism in Romania, my generation inherited a country profoundly broken and stripped of the opportunities people in the Western world took for granted. The only visible way to break the shackles of the past and get out was to constantly reach for excellence.

Being first in class didn’t come easily to me. I loved learning new things and generally enjoyed school. But the pressure to be the best in order to secure the best opportunities later in life was always hanging in the air. Getting a bad grade gave me anxiety that gradually worsened as I grew up. What started as a genuine enjoyment of learning turned into a weight I carried day in and day out.

I have no memories of school in which I didn’t wake up with a ball in my throat and pressure in my chest. I thought everybody felt that. I thought it was just part of life. And slowly, I forgot what it was like to wake up feeling excited about the unknown, about the many directions a day could take me.

The walls closed in when I was eighteen. I was preparing for my final exams, taking an advanced English exam, learning to play the violin, competing and maintaining a first in class position, all at once. I remember sitting in my after-school Romanian tutor’s office, holding back tears and breaking down crying every time she left the room to smoke. My passions were the first to suffer: I dropped the violin, and soon I had no energy to dance anymore. The final exams loomed like a dark mass, an irreversible event that could determine the rest of my life. There was no room for rest. Only more work.

After all of that, I didn’t even get into the university I applied for, over a technicality. At the time, it felt like a slap in the face. Looking back, it was one of the greatest gifts life has given me.

I left Romania as a burnt-out eighteen-year-old, living on the last of my graduation money, and found a job in Budapest as a secretary. I was still grappling with the shame of not getting into uni, as if I had failed everyone around me despite working myself to the bone. Part of me was restless and eager to return to being an A student. But another part really enjoyed the absence of exams for the first time in years.

That job gave me something I didn’t know I needed: time. Time to rest, to recalibrate, to ask what I actually wanted rather than what was expected of me. By June the following year, when my university results appeared on a large screen, well above the threshold, I had changed course entirely. Instead of Hungarian literature, which I excelled at but wasn’t eager to pursue further, I chose journalism and photography, which I was deeply passionate about.

I didn’t realise it then, but that forced rest had cleared enough space for me to finally hear myself.

Fast forward to 2019. I embarked on an ambitious documentary project across Central America with nine months of savings and the hope that the project would gain traction and sustain itself. That is not what happened.

I started on the Yucatán peninsula in May, traveled by bus through Guatemala, and back up into Chiapas by June. I stayed in a migrant shelter in Guatemala City and volunteered in an after-school children’s programme at Lake Atitlán, teaching English in a tiny room as though it were an ordinary school day in any normal country. I was interviewing people, editing pictures and articles, building and managing a website, travelling to a new location every two weeks, seven days a week.

What drove me was a genuine belief that I could use my skills to help people. What kept me going through the suffering I witnessed daily were the intense moments of beauty that accompanied it. And underneath all of that, the only way I had ever known how to operate: push through everything, because stopping means failing.

I wasn’t travelling alone. The relationship I was in was fracturing under the pressure, two people pushing in different directions, neither willing to admit how close to the edge we both were. That combination made everything harder and the stopping felt even less possible.

It all came to a halt in Celaya, Mexico. I was in a migrant shelter, listening to harrowing stories of people fleeing violence only to find more suffering on the backs of freight trains, while simultaneously trying to hold a breaking relationship together and keep the project moving forward. For the first time in my life, I had nothing left to fall back on. I was thousands of miles from family, surrounded by other people’s suffering, and drowning slowly in my own.

By the end of those nine months, I wasn’t only broke. I was burned out in a way that went all the way down to the bone.

What happened next was the last thing I would have chosen and exactly what I needed: Covid. I was relieved to have a reason to retreat from the world, because I had nothing left to give it. The worst thing that could have happened in that moment would have been succeeding at the project. It would have meant more work, more pushing, more of the same.

Back in Romania, locked down and locked in, there was nowhere left to go but inward. The days seemed impossibly long. Every time my mind wandered to the thought of being trapped in Romania indefinitely, a familiar anxiety started rising in my chest. I realised quickly that if I let the thoughts run, I was in for a very difficult time of unspecified length.

So I decided to keep travelling, just inward instead of outward. A 21-day meditation challenge, followed by a 30-day yoga challenge. Books I hadn’t had time to read in years. Hobbies that required me to slow down and attend to each individual movement rather than the end result. And a nine-month sacred feminine workshop that changed the way I understood rest entirely.

Until that workshop, rest had always been something that happened to me against my will. What I learned there was that rest is not the absence of productivity. It is the source of it. It is the space from which things grow, where nourishment comes from, where the feminine principle of yin asks to be honoured rather than overridden. Not only for women. For everyone. That understanding did not arrive all at once, but it settled slowly, the way truth always does.

Within that space, things began to emerge. Clarity about my life, learnings from my past, and gradually the direction forward. The most vivid illustration of this came when I felt an overwhelming pull to walk the Camino de Santiago. I had no plan and no money, but the pull was so strong that I made the decision anyway, trusting that once I committed, things would work out. And they did, in ways I could not have engineered by planning.

What followed that period of rest was the rediscovery of desires I had buried under years of effort. After the Camino, I started listening to my heart again, rediscovering my passion for photography, embracing a slower and more meaningful way of traveling, and allowing life to surprise me once more. By opening myself to new experiences and connections, I eventually met the person who became both my husband and my best friend.

In all the pushing forward, I could never hear the whispers of my intuition. Every step was preceded by ten other steps planned from an exhausted frame of mind. Once I was rested, I realised I only needed to see the next signpost, not the whole map.

Rest became a practice rather than a surrender. Now, when I reach the point in a cycle where my thoughts cloud over, tasks feel like effort, and I have no energy to spare, I step away without judgment or resentment. I don’t push myself to finish something unless I feel the energy of completion behind it. Sometimes a task sits untouched for a week. When I return to it, I bring new insight and clarity, and the outcome is better than anything I could have forced.

And the funny thing is that the more I committed to conscious rest, the more productive I became over the long term. I stopped burning out halfway through things. When I felt overwhelm building, I would take myself away from my workstation and get outside, sometimes forcefully, until the feeling passed. Because of that, I was able to nurture long-term projects, relationships, and creative work in a way I never had before.

I still go into overdrive sometimes. But I very rarely push myself to burnout anymore, because I know now that rest is not lost time. It is the investment that makes everything else sustainable. Looking back at where I came from, a post-communist society where excellence was survival and stillness was failure, I understand now what it actually cost me not to stop.

For someone with my background, rest is not passive. It is one of the most radical and countercultural acts available to us. And I choose it, every day, as deliberately and as defiantly as I once chose to leave.

Cover art by David Hettinger

One recurring game was to build a giant sand volcano with my brother, complete with little towns perched on the side of it. When we were finished, we would fill the crater with water and then poke holes in the side so that the lava would sweep away the towns and destroy the volcano in the process.

I remember playing this game over and over again, just for the fun of it. I loved creating a world out of nothing and having complete control over what happens within that world.

As I started going to school, the time allocated to play became shorter and shorter, until at some point it stopped entirely. I don’t remember the exact day. It just kind of faded out of my daily routine. There was no more space for boredom. Only for homework.

I know now that the creativity didn’t disappear. It just went quiet, waiting for me to come back to it.

I chose photography as a profession, thinking that if art is my work, then I will always feel creatively fulfilled. But that is not always the case. A creative passion can become work just like any other. The well can feel depleted even in the midst of an interesting project.

In 2018 I was living on the tiny island of Malta. I had taken a job as a barista, was training to become an English teacher, and felt myself drawn to the colorful summer festivities, the Festa. Every day after work, I would pick up my camera and head out onto the streets to photograph the colorful processions, the bands playing music, and people just having a great time. It was a period of creative reawakening, and in the middle of it, I came across the work of Julia Cameron.

The Artist’s Way provided the roadmap and the tools to help me fully engage with my inner artist after years of considering art as something that could be a hobby at best. She gave me permission to return to that six-year-old girl building sand volcanoes and pressing leaves just for the fun of it.

The book introduced two practices that changed the way I relate to my creativity. I have lived with one of them religiously for eight years. The other, I am still learning to make more room for.

The first is the morning pages. To explain it very plainly, it is the practice of sitting down every day, at whatever time of day suits you best, and writing in a stream of consciousness style. But rather than explain the practice, I will tell you what it looks like for me and what it has done in my life.

Every morning I wake up between seven and seven thirty. First, I take a shower to wake up a little, make myself a glass of lemon water, and sit down to write immediately. I write two to three pages in my 300-page A5 notebook. Whatever comes up, I put it down on paper.

I am not saying that starting the pages and becoming consistent was an easy process. Especially at the beginning, it brought up difficult feelings, memories, and traumas that I needed to address and work through. But that is the wonderful thing about the pages: I can just write it all out, and that alone is a huge part of the healing process.

The consistency came more as a necessity than something that felt natural. I started noticing that on the days I wasn’t writing, I felt off balance, my thoughts were cloudy, and my emotions went unchecked. The more I returned to the pages, the clearer I got about my life. What started as an exploration of my past slowly turned into a daily companion that helped me remember and let go in equal measure.

Some days I still skip my morning pages. Some days, what comes up makes me feel angry, even ashamed. And some days I just want to throw the notebook into the sea. But those days pass. And when I sit down again to write, I realise that the pages have become my most intimate companion in my life and my travels. They hold all my deepest thoughts. Whenever I get insecure or uncertain about myself, all I need to do is leaf back a couple of months and realise how far I’ve come.

The notebooks have traveled with me around the world. From Malta to Mexico to Spain and beyond. Now they are all safely stashed away in my childhood room in Romania, because I know I will always find them there. And in the meantime, I keep diligently increasing their numbers.

I don’t edit myself and try not to judge myself for expressing anger or frustration, sadness, or even despair. It’s all good. Once it’s out, it’s out, and I can finally stop carrying it. Every day I start with a clear and empty mind. If I have ongoing issues in my life, the pages help me reflect. If a trauma gets triggered, the pages help me process. If I had an amazing adventure, the pages would help me commemorate it so that I can return to it whenever I need the good memories.

For any writer, morning pages are a must. But I would say it is a must for anybody. Putting pen to paper, day after day, I record my life in a vivid, alive way. More than anything, the pages gave me a tool to clear my mind of clutter. To look deeply every day and decide what stays and what must go. They helped me learn about myself, about my wants, needs, and dreams. They also helped me learn about my shadows, the darkness that resides in all of us, and bring it to the light so that I can work with it and create alongside it, instead of against it.

The second practice Julia Cameron recommends is the artist’s date, and I will be honest, this is where I still have the most resistance.

The idea is simple. You set aside time every week just for yourself to do something that serves no purpose other than making the playful part of you happy and filling up your inner well. This can be anything that connects you to that childhood sense of wonder.

One of my favorite ways is to go into a Flying Tiger store and browse until my eyes get tired. I don’t even have to buy anything. Do I really need a bubble machine for my desk or a pencil case shaped like a cactus? Probably not. But the fact that these things exist is proof that somebody somewhere in a design studio just let their imagination run wild and came up with something that has no other purpose but to give you joy.

Another activity I love is going to a bookstore and finding the most creative book cover. I can spend hours looking at the fantastic world of book cover design. Usually, in these places, there is also a section for office supplies, which is just an extra treat. All those colorful post-its, pens, notebooks and stickers fill me with joy and make my imagination soar.

Even though I find the practice amazingly helpful, I am still struggling to implement it consistently into my life. It tends to happen accidentally, when I find myself with an hour to spare or come across a store that draws my attention. And to be honest, the longer I go without, the more stifled my creativity feels and the harder it becomes to express it. I am still building this practice. I do my best and allow myself to be imperfect.

Beyond these two practices, I have found that the single most grounding thing I can do for my creativity is to make something with my hands.

When I feel restless and reach for my phone to escape the discomfort of having nothing to do, I try to pause and ask myself a different question. What would I do if there was no internet, no outside world, just an afternoon that from the perspective of a six-year-old seemed endless? Sometimes the answer is pottery. Sometimes it is a needle and thread. Sometimes it is watercolors and a blank page. Whatever comes up first, before the practical mind has a chance to dismiss it, that is the thing worth following.

I learned this most vividly toward the end of COVID. I had gone back to Romania after the pandemic ended, my project in Mexico, and my relationship fell apart at the same time. It was early October. The only thing I had on my calendar was the Camino de Santiago the following March. Plenty of time and very little to fill it with.

That is when I picked up an embroidery frame for the first time. My sole purpose was to fill my days with something enjoyable, something that kept my attention away from time crawling like a snail and out of the whirlpool of heartbreak and insecurity. I ordered a frame and pre-drawn textiles and started developing three little floral patterns, working slowly, listening to lo-fi music, tuning into something quiet in myself that I hadn’t visited in a while.

As I wove my heartbreak into the threads, something beautiful started emerging. And as the flowers on the textile became more colorful and tangible, I started feeling better about myself. I knew from early on that I wasn’t making these for myself. As one piece after another was finished, I gifted them to the women in my life who have inspired me with their resilience and strength through numerous hardships and heartbreaks: my mom and my two grandmothers. My sadness turned into joy when I saw my pieces hanging in prominent places in their kitchens and bedrooms.

I started with that embroidery frame ordered online and a ten-dollar painting set from the local crafts store. I eventually signed up for the painting class I had saved in my bookmarks months before and promptly forgotten about. None of it required talent, preparation, or the right moment. It just required showing up and allowing myself to be the child who still wants to play.

We never grow out of that. We are just conditioned out of it.

And when I began to nurture that part of myself again, even in small and imperfect ways, joy started returning to the parts of my everyday life that had gone quiet.

The purpose of these activities is not to create something practical or even purposeful. It is to play, so that when it is time to get down to serious business, the well of my imagination is filled to the brim and I can reach in for new ideas.

What I learned is that starting small is the whole point. One thing, once a week, even during a lunch break. I put it in my calendar and protect it the way I would any other appointment, because I have learned that it matters just as much, if not more. That time is not wasted. It is the time that makes everything else possible.

As time went on, I found more and more ways to weave these practices into my life. I stopped feeling guilty about the time spent on them because I came to understand that they were not separate from my work. They were the foundation of it. We have been taught that productivity is the be-all and end-all of everything. But I kept coming back to the same question: what about my goals? What about my precious time?

And if you are not sure where to start, here are the books that opened the door for me.

Julia Cameron: The Artist’s Way
Austin Kleon: Steal Like an Artist
Keri Smith: The Imaginary World Of...
Steven Pressfield: The War of Art

The first time I felt it was when I was around 12 years old, when people first started commenting on my hips. Members of my family, as well as other children in school. I felt sexualised from a very young age. I remember a relative commenting on my growing hips as if it was something endearing, like telling a child that they have grown. It made me feel embarrassed and wanting to hide my body so people don’t stare and comment on it.

This message wasn’t just coming from men. I saw it in my mother’s continuous struggle with one diet after another. My grandmother’s lamentations that I inherited her hips. The magazines, news, and internet full of pictures of bodies that looked nothing like mine. And the continuous quest of trying to find clothes that actually fit my figure and look good on me.

I have had many conversations with my mom about body image. It’s a topic that is difficult for both of us and is challenging to address, because the message is still very much the same: you need to be smaller, taking up space is not okay. Growing up, I never had the opportunity to explore what my normal body shape would be like, because everything that was even a little curvy was considered big.

Living life on this planet is a continuous struggle to decipher and differentiate between what is our truth and what is not ours to carry. But that is no easy task when we are constantly bombarded by reminders of why we are not good enough.

When I was 24 years old, I embarked on the journey of a lifetime through Mexico, looking for stories to tell and to explore my lifelong attraction to Mesoamerican shamanism. The trip expanded my consciousness in ways I couldn’t have imagined and slowly reshaped my view of what it meant to have a “normal” body. I was slowly, deliberately moving through a country that didn’t look at the body the same way the Western world did. I felt it in the energy of the place and saw it reflected all around me: bodies weren’t treated like something to shrink and fit others’ expectations. It was revered as the sacred vessel that carries the human soul through this journey we call life.

Another aspect of this journey was that I was finally in a country where being curvy was the norm, instead of the exception. Clothes fit me without trouble, and the sizing didn’t feel like a damning verdict anymore.

Looking back at pictures from that time, I see a young woman going through a period of change. A woman on a quest to find health in her own body. Someone who looked perfectly normal and had no idea, because the destructive thoughts were so loud they drowned out everything else. I couldn't see that then, but I can see it now.

That said, I am not out of the woods on that front. I still well up every time I try on last summer’s shorts and feel that they have become tighter. I still look at pictures taken on a hike or on the beach, scrutinizing small parts of my body instead of seeing the entirety of myself. I still get a pang of guilt on occasion after eating an amazing Neapolitan pizza or enjoying an ice cream on a hot day.

As if without constant control, I would balloon up to an unimaginable size. The voice is still there and tells me I am not good because I am not small. Unfortunately, sometimes the realisation only comes years later, looking back at a body I spent so long fighting, finally able to see it for what it actually was: beautiful, unique, powerful.

But whenever I start spiralling down, I remember the women of Mexico who inhabit their bodies like the sacred temple they were given. And I remember the women of my lineage. The women who can spend an entire day working the fields, hiking the mountains, carrying heavy loads supported by strong legs, grounded hips, and muscular arms and backs. That is what real beauty looks like for me, even if that small part of me can’t always believe that it’s true.

On the days that I feel I am enough, I feel an enormous wave of gratitude for my body, for the things it allows me to do. I even love my rolls and more muscular parts as reflections of meals enjoyed, risks taken, and mountains climbed.

In the words of Sophia Bush:

These days, I increasingly feel like I don’t need to control my body; instead, I feel a responsibility to take care of it, so that she can take care of me.

This body that allows me to travel, to see the world, to experience pain and pleasure, to come up with new ideas and to act on them, to dress in colorful clothes, to swim in the sea. When I look back at pictures from when I thought I was big, what I really see is a person who is just taking up space. A person who is taking her unique beauty, her unique physical heritage, and showing her the world.

Instead of asking, " How does my body look today?”, I ask “What does my body need today?” “How do I feel today?”. Questions that help me really feel into the parts of myself that are invisible to the critical eye and can only be felt by me: the only person inhabiting this body.

One of the first steps to living on my own terms has been learning to recognise the lies I've been fed about my own body, and choosing every day to treat it differently. Some days are harder than others. The inner critic gets loud. It tells me to skip the art and do a workout instead, to skip the local cuisine and eat only salad, to skip the shorts and the bikini, and hide. On those days, I try to ask myself a different question entirely: what would make me feel intensely alive today? What does my body actually want to experience? The breeze on my legs, the taste of tacos, the resistance of a pencil in my hand as I draw the scene in front of me?

I travel for the novelty of the experience. But while I do, I also travel for the expansion of my love of myself in the present. I take as many pictures as I can, because one day I will look back at the person who was so self-conscious and think: wow, she looked beautiful!

I want to say something to the twelve-year-old me, and anyone else hiding her hips and wanting to disappear. Are you listening?

The people commenting on your body are too busy worrying about their own to truly see yours. And the ones who are cruel about it are just in pain themselves. That is all it ever was. Don’t look at yourself through their eyes. Take care of your body. Feed her well, move her, let her be whatever size she naturally settles into. That is the right size. That has always been the right size.

Don’t let the day pass without acknowledging that, because one day you will look back and feel sad for not letting her know sooner.

I was born into an ethnic group, the Szeklers, whose name means “The people who stay.” Historically, a community of border guards of the Hungarian empire, stationed at the natural borders of the Eastern Carpathians, they were people defined by staying put.

I was instead dreaming of travelling and discovering the world, and I experienced an intense longing from a very early age.

I believe I was born into the place I come from with the weight of expectations, rules, and customs already weighing on me before I even drew my first breath. Growing up in the traditional, patriarchal society of rural Romania, many aspects of myself were just constantly pulling me away from what was considered safe and acceptable for a girl.

My heart wanted the freedom of discovering the world at large, and every day I spent surrounded by the same familiar mountains felt like I was dying a little inside. When I voiced that intense longing, the people around me didn't understand. It was a sadness and loneliness that permeated everything. Leaving that place was less of a decision than a necessity to satisfy the longing of my heart and find out who I actually was, not who society wanted me to be.

Every summer as a child, my parents would pack us up in their car and drive us 12 hours to neighboring Hungary for our summer holidays. As a child, that was the greatest adventure I could imagine. Riding in a car for long hours, sometimes through the night to arrive somewhere completely different and unfamiliar. At the end of every one of those holidays, I was overcome with an intense sadness and despair that wouldn't leave me for days.

When I was 16 years old, my family went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was the first time I had ever flown and my first experience of the Mediterranean. I was immediately hooked. I remember the stillness of the air filled with humidity as the evening breeze fanned the leaves of palm trees, bathing in the golden, warm light of the setting sun. It was love at first sight, and I knew that I had to live in a place like that one day.

Returning to Romania after every trip felt like leaving a piece of my heart behind. Every travel experience made me more eager to go and explore more. Every decision in my life was fueled by the desire to satisfy my heart's hunger for learning, growing, exploring, and discovering more of the world.

It was the fuel for my decision to leave Romania at 18 and step out into the unknown, one of the hardest things I have ever done. Leaving my parents and my baby brother behind hurt like hell. And yet I knew that staying would hurt me more. Five years later, the same fuel drove me to leave Hungary and a secure job behind and move to Malta. The same fuel that made me embark on a journey through Mexico and Guatemala, to step onto the Camino de Santiago, and to climb the tallest mountain of Costa Rica.

When I tell people about these experiences, they think that somehow the pieces of my life fell into place effortlessly. What they often don't see is the many difficult decisions, heartbreaks, and failures that accompany such a life.

I feel there is a misconception about people who choose the unfamiliar path, the ones who decide to live life on their own terms. That they made it. That they have it all together.

I disagree with this wholeheartedly.

The idea of "making it" only makes sense if we imagine life to be a linear series of events that can be calculated, managed, and controlled. It cannot be, not for the people who chose a conventional life, and not for those who chose something more specific to themselves.

The difference between these two paths is not about the destination. The destination is the same for all of us. What differs is the quality of the decisions we make along the way. The more we follow our own hearts rather than the expectations of others, the more our lives begin to feel like our own. And when we try to emulate someone else's path instead, eventually an intense longing surfaces. A longing for the life we are not living. I know that longing intimately because I grew up inside it.

Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

The only thing I have truly figured out is how to set the receiver to the frequency of my own heart. How to hear her call in the noise of the world. My life looks the way it does because it feels true to me. Not making choices aligned with my heart made me depressed and anxious on a daily basis. So I made sacrifices, deliberate choices that lessened that pain, and what I found was that my life was unfolding in a magical, surprising way in the direction of what I truly wanted.

My goal then became to learn the tools and techniques that could help me keep this attunement, to feel when I am out of balance or when my actions are not my own, rather motivated by past habits, expectations, or trauma. It is a life lived on the quest for freedom and authenticity. What I share here are my discoveries, the resources, techniques, and teachers that helped me find my way, so that you can begin to build your own toolset towards the discovery of your unique path.

I can still remember when that portion of my life began to solidify into something fixed. Being an outdoors child with no phones or internet to distract me, I was bored quite a lot. If there was no one around to play with, you had to invent games yourself. Whenever I complained about boredom to the grownups around me, they would tell me to appreciate it while I could, because when you’re a grownup, you don’t have the luxury of boredom anymore.

So I entertained myself by learning, by building new interests, finding new hobbies, and making new friends. In the summer, I played football with the neighbor kids and cycled for aerobics classes in the next village. In winter, I played ice hockey at the village rink, went sledding in the hills, and nurtured a dream about a career in figure skating. I was always in motion, always adding something new.

The shift away from all of that was gradual. It arrived in small messages from my family and the world at large, the idea that being a child was a luxury with an expiration date. Especially as a girl, I felt pushed towards certain decisions rather than offered them. I was made fun of for having boyish interests. My beloved shorts and tank tops were replaced with more modest clothes. Art was an elective class while the sciences were obligatory. The world was persistently telling me to take up less space and squeeze myself into a box.

I found it very hard to answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” as I neared my eighteenth birthday. The question felt so enormous and so final that I froze every time I had to think about it.

Everybody told me I needed to become somebody. I just couldn’t pin down who that somebody was. I wanted to be a midwife because I loved babies, until I learned what the training actually involved. Then law called to me, mostly thanks to Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Then journalism. Then photography. Then teaching. Then a season as a barista. Each one felt right until it didn’t, and then I was on to the next.

Even within photography, I kept searching. Street, then travel, then documentary, then architecture, then interiors. What I was really looking for, underneath all of it, was permission to do what I had always known I wanted: to create. To paint, to sing, to dance, to play music, to write stories, to make films. These were the paths society had already quietly dismissed as hobbies, as impractical weekend activities.

The message from every direction was that a niche is what makes you successful. So I tried. I stood at a travel convention in Berlin trying to sell my photography services to tour operators. I drove through the French Alps, convincing chalet owners to invest in interior photography. Neither worked, because my heart wasn’t in it. It was too narrow, too one-sided, and it slowly suffocated everything I loved about making images in the first place.

What I needed, apparently, was a polished and digestible version of myself. An elevator pitch for the world. Partly because my path has always been unconventional, and unconventional paths require defending. Partly because I grew up as a girl in a traditional, rural, patriarchal society, where that alone gives others permission to question your choices. Whether it was me announcing at eighteen that I was going to move abroad, declaring only a month before that I would become a photographer, or that I was going to Mexico to try my hand at field reporting. Every decision was a negotiation with the expectations of the people closest to me.

When social media arrived, it industrialised the whole business of niching down. Suddenly, self-definition wasn’t just something your family demanded at the dinner table. It was something algorithms demanded of you daily. Anyone with an Instagram page probably knows how hard it is to define yourself in a couple of words. I have stared at those few available characters on multiple occasions, trying to compress a lifetime of experiences, passions, and professions into a tidy phrase. I still get a headache just thinking about it.

For the better part of a decade, social media became my primary tool for self-comparison and cultivating a low-level, constant fear of missing out. I’m only now beginning to understand the extent of the mental energy it consumed. Competing for millions of people’s attention is a futile and hypnotising endeavour, one you know you shouldn’t do and yet feel you cannot stop, because you need a presence online not only to connect with people but to be considered someone who exists at all. And when algorithms decide what gets seen and when, you are always one step behind.

The deeper cost is this: the more you aspire to what someone else is presenting online, the further you drift from what makes you uniquely yourself. We became a society of imitators, and somewhere in that process, we forgot that imitation is only valuable as a stepping stone. It is supposed to lead somewhere original. Instead, it became the destination, and we forgot to invent and create on our own terms.

I’m still baffled by the expectation that eighteen-year-olds should know exactly what they want to do with the rest of their lives, before they’ve had the opportunity to fully live them. It is just as baffling to keep expecting people to pin themselves down in short headlines, to define themselves by a single thing they do, as if that definition will hold forever. I believe that deep down, we are still the children who wanted to try everything, who just wanted to be curious and play. I believe that is our whole reason for being here.

This is not an argument for being a generalist. It is an argument for being and owning all that you are to exist. Personally and professionally. Without apology and without the need for an elevator pitch.

So why not try out as many professions and art forms as we can, building ourselves up, creating our own story as a beautiful piece of art rather than a commodity to sell? We need money to survive, yes. But we also need our hearts, our freedom, and our passion.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman: Song of Myself

Today, on the Island of Elba, I have given myself back the luxury of boredom. My mornings begin slowly, with writing, yoga, meditation, and reading. Then a colourful breakfast that I share with my husband without rushing. Then a walk to the beach with our dog.

Only then do I sit down to do the work that actually lights me up, with people I genuinely enjoy. I work on 3-4 projects at any given moment, because the variety lights me up and keeps me engaged. I teach Hungarian and English to people who are starting a new life in a new country. I am also building a photo book from my long-term documentary project. I write my stories here on Substack and work on a book about my life and experiences. I am also planning out my next documentary project on a new topic.

No one-liner can encompass all of that. There is no job title with that description either.

Besides my work, it’s just as important for me to nurture my inner child. So I sign up for yoga challenges to work towards doing the splits (quite a ways to go still). I learn about embroidery techniques. I read books on 4 different topics simultaneously. I sign up for workshops.

I work every day only for as long as I have something real to give it, not a minute more. Then I take another walk to the beach to close the day. It is a simple life and an intentional one, and I feel alive in it every single morning. My inner child is just as nurtured as my outer projects.

That is what owning all of myself looks like. Not squeezed into a headline or defined as a niche.

A life lived fully, on my own terms.

The other day, a friend called me in a panic. She had applied for a job from abroad, arrived at the place she was going to call home for the next six months, and found it in a state of complete disaster. Everything was covered in dust and dirt and hair, black mold on the pillows. She was desperate, and as she described it, something stirred in my chest. A familiar heat. I’ve been here before, but I just couldn’t conjure up the specific memory yet.

She was faced with a choice: stay, clean it herself, and hope the job would be better than the apartment suggested. Or pack up immediately, find somewhere safe, and start again.

I felt the heat rise from my core through my chest to my throat. I almost blurted out: Are you going to let them treat you like that? Do you think a moldy pillow and a pile of garbage in the kitchen is what you deserve? But I stopped myself. That would have been me telling her how I saw it. I wanted her to find her own way to the answer. So instead I asked: “How do you feel about staying here long term? What would your life look like in two months? In six? What is the best thing that could come from leaving? What is the worst?”

As she worked through the questions, I felt her energy shift. She could see that the state of the apartment was just a sign of things to come, and that the odds of it getting better were much lower than the odds of it getting worse. Once she reached that conclusion herself, there was no more doubt. Only the obvious: this is not what I want. I have to go. And once the decision was made, the next step became inevitable.

That heat in my chest was familiar. And by the end of the day, I remembered why.

I grew up in a small, sheltered town in the mountains of Romania. Leaving your family to travel at eighteen was not something women in my community did. When I moved to Hungary and then Malta, I was met with resistance. When I eventually decided to go to Mexico and then travel through Central America, my family and friends were united in their opposition. They told me how dangerous it was. They made me feel, somehow, that I was hurting them with my own personal choices. I left behind a secure office job, a salary good enough to save up from, and every version of safety they had ever approved of. I did it anyway.

What followed was six months of travel with a partner and a relationship that was quietly, unmistakably falling apart. I wasn’t ready to admit that yet. I couldn’t afford to. I was already carrying so much, already so far from anything the people who loved me could understand. If I acknowledged the failure of the relationship on top of everything else, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep going. So I held it at arm’s length and kept moving.

That’s how we ended up in Petén, Guatemala, trying to couchsurf in the apartment of a local councilwoman. Before we crossed the border, someone had warned us: steer clear of local politics, and be careful where you sleep. We were not careful enough. It just so happened that our visit coincided with local elections. The apartment was a concrete block with paint peeling off the walls, covered in handwritten testimonials, a bed that hadn’t been slept in for years, food burned to the stove, rice scattered across the floor. Outside, the neighbourhood was the kind where local shops were guarded by men with shotguns.

Step one, when you find yourself in a situation like that, is to find the cheapest alternative available in a town with almost no internet access. Step two is to accidentally book a room in the local motel that, as it turns out, rents exclusively to pimps and prostitutes. Current company excluded, of course. Step three is to spend the night in quiet panic, searching Airbnb on a bad connection for anything safe and affordable. And step four is to move into the compound of a Jehovah’s Witness family, which sounds alarming until you realise they are among the calmest, most gentle people you have ever encountered. Every Sunday, they gathered in the patio, shared a meal, and sang together quietly. It was the first time in weeks I had felt safe.

But safe is not the same as whole. What I didn’t tell my friend, and what took me years to understand, is that the swimming pool didn’t fix everything. We were still stuck inside those walls. The world outside was still unsafe. My partner was still someone I couldn’t lean on. The malaria pills were pulling me under in a way I didn’t yet have words for. I had found shelter, but I was still very much alone. And I didn’t tell anyone back home, because I couldn’t afford for them to be right about me.

And that, I think, is the part nobody talks about. We celebrate the pivot, the brave decision, the fresh start. But we don’t often talk about the part where you’ve made the brave decision, and you’re still in the mess, still afraid, still pretending to be fine. The part where knowing what we don’t want is as important as knowing what we do, and where the road to that knowledge asks more of us than we expected. We have to be willing to go down the wrong path fully, and sometimes fail spectacularly, before we understand why it wasn’t ours to take. The shame of that is real. But so is what waits on the other side of it.

What I gained from that period wasn’t obvious at first. But somewhere on the other side of it, I noticed that I had become more grounded in my own choices. I had supported myself through a mess of a life that was unintelligible to everyone else but felt completely alive to me, even in the middle of all its difficulties. I was living freely, creating freely, and relying on nobody but myself. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

By the evening of that day, my friend was settled in a temporary accommodation, writing a resignation letter, and already thinking about what came next. And as we talked, I found myself thinking about Guatemala not with embarrassment or regret, but with something closer to gratitude. Not necessarily for the suffering, but more for what the suffering asked of me. It asked me to find out exactly how much I could hold. And I held quite a lot.

And maybe that is the deepest thing failure teaches us, underneath all the shame and the noise and the voices that said we should have known better. That we can count on ourselves. That when we finally stop looking for someone else to hand us the answer, something in us steps forward and shows us the way. The path doesn’t open up, and then we walk it. We walk, and the path opens.

I spent the last couple of years building a photo business that my heart wasn’t really in. I spent a lot of time learning how to run a business, compiling a portfolio, and trying to make my art profitable. Or so I thought.

What really happened is that I put all my focus on the existential anxiety of work: worrying about how photography would make money, how much it would make, and whether I’d be able to pay rent that month. And in that process of rushing and pushing and networking and marketing, there was one thing I wasn’t doing: taking pictures.

All of that came to a screeching halt this year, when it finally became clear that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, continue on that path. I decided to dismantle the business and leave the Haute-Savoie region of France, where I had been trying to build a life.

I say trying, because if I’m honest, it was never quite right for either of us. My husband and I met two years ago in Evian-les-Bains, where the water comes from. We fell in love with the area and decided to try to build a life there together. It had everything we thought we wanted: nature on our doorstep, beautiful summers, mild winters, mountains, and a lake. It was perfect on paper. But as time went by, we both began to feel that it wasn’t what we truly wanted. Mentally, it checked every box, but our hearts were pulling us elsewhere.

So we decided to take some time to think about our next move, and spend a couple of months on the Island of Elba in Italy, a beloved getaway far less known and crowded than other Italian islands.

These next three months for me are about finding my way back to my creative core and taking pictures purely for the pleasure of it. I’m also painting, embroidering, and reading books that nourish my soul. It is truly a process that is breathing life back into me and my creativity. Part of that process was finally taking my camera out and bringing it along on a walk.

We visited the beautiful town of Porto Azzurro, a beloved destination for coffee, seafood, and the general warmth of the place. I was giddy with excitement, shooting pictures left and right, sometimes checking the last shot in the viewfinder, only to realise, too late, that I hadn’t actually put an SD card in my camera.

Now, if this had been a professional shoot, it wouldn’t have happened. I’m far too careful with checklists and preparation to forget something as basic as an SD card. But this was just about fun, enjoyment, and taking pictures for pleasure. And I immensely enjoyed the process. And maybe that’s all it ever needed to be: not about output, not about pictures I’d revisit and edit and maybe share, but about being in the moment, enjoying the views, taking pictures with no practical motivation. And at the end of it, just sitting with the memory of that experience.

It’s interesting how the pictures I didn’t take, or didn’t get to keep, live in my memory so much more vividly than the ones I did. And I feel like that is such a valuable creative exercise: to make a piece of art and let it dissolve, so that it exists only in the experience of making it, and nowhere beyond that. Art created purely for ourselves, for the enjoyment of our inner child. It anchors you in the present in a different way. It asks you to pay attention with a rare kind of intensity.

Do I wish I had those pictures from today? Sure! They would have made beautiful memories, and I would have loved to share them here. And that desire to share is real. The joy of making art, for me, is as much in the sharing of it as in the making. I want to channel the energy of what I create out into the world rather than hold it only for myself.

But what I was left with on this particular day felt more profound: a reminder not to get attached to the end result of any experience. Because the pressure of that attachment is what silenced me in the first place.

There is a rawness to stepping off the path of outside expectations. The fear of failure feels more present now, not less, because the choices are entirely my own. Where will this lead? What will I find out about myself? Where do I fit in the world when I don’t yet know exactly where I’m going? I don’t have answers to those questions. But I am learning to trust that the not-knowing is part of it. That you don’t always get to keep the picture. Sometimes all you get is the memory of having looked, and that has to be enough.

As a child, I loved consuming stories. Fairy tales and fantasy cartoons flung my imagination out into the universe. Documentaries about the natural world and the history of our universe were always available on exchanged VCR cassettes, and the many maps and atlases that filled our home and kept growing in number.

I’ve always been fascinated by the mysteries of life. As a child, those mysteries were explained through the highly visual stories of the Bible; stories that have captivated human imagination for centuries. That spiritual aspect of my upbringing set me on a path of exploring the unknown. And when the limitations of organized religion no longer allowed me to expand, I chose to venture onto my own path and seek my own answers.

Shamanism, medicinal plants, and alchemy have become my fascinations. And what I’ve found is this: the answer is always hidden in the next question you ask. Life becomes a continuous exploration, an expansion into the unknown. And perhaps the point is to make as much of it known to yourself as you desire, while enjoying the journey along the way.

It took me many years of hard work and getting lost to return to this truth again and again. I feel that I’m currently in one of those cycles of returning.

For a long time, I created art purely for my own enjoyment. But as I kept coming back to this truth, the desire to share it began to grow, and I found myself searching for my people. Those I could share my art and experience with and connect with on a more genuine level.

Social media, however, felt exhausting. Its pace is far beyond what I can comfortably sustain. The constant expectation to be present and active drained me more than it gave.

And so I’m here. To slow down. To come back to myself and my heart, and to explore in other directions. To live more creatively and more fully. And to share this journey with anyone who feels called to walk alongside me and share their own truth and art.

Here, you can expect more musings like this, along with inspiration, projects I’m working on, things I encounter on my hikes and travels, insights I receive, and whatever happens to excite me in the moment.

I have no attachment to this turning into anything beyond an outlet for living creatively and leaving a trace of that life. If it inspires someone, that’s wonderful. And if something resonates with you, I invite you to connect, share about yourself, your life, your process. I’m here for a more genuine way to be in the world.

Take care and enjoy your day!

Szidonia