A woman recently told me something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
She’d been through a really hard chapter of her life.
She had images from that time she’d basically written off. Ones she hated to look at, ones she’d considered deleting entirely.
But when she finally went back to them, she didn’t see what she expected to see.
Instead of seeing someone drowning in one of the worst chapters of her life, she saw strength.
It was then she saw just how strong she actually was.
That’s the thing about photographs from the hard seasons. They don’t show you at your worst.
They show you surviving the worst. And that is not the same thing at all.
We tend to only want to be photographed when we feel “ready.”
When we’re thinner, or more rested, or healed. Or when we’ve finally arrived at the version of ourselves we’ve been working toward.
And so we wait. We opt out.
We tell ourselves we’ll do it later, when things settle down, when we feel better, when the timing is right.
And what that means is our visual record ends up full of the good days, and practically devoid of the harder times.
Sometimes, it’s the harder seasons that actually change us. The chapters we don’t talk about at dinner parties, but that quietly made us who we are.
Have you felt that way?
Like you’d rather not have evidence of a particular chapter in your life?
I have. More than once.
My first kiddo was born right before the pandemic.
You know what was happening during the pandemic. Did I want to show up in photos? No.
But we still showed up. We took the snapshots. We celebrated the small things happening inside our little bubble while the world was doing what it was doing outside of it.
Then we moved to North Carolina.
And almost immediately after we got here, I found out I was pregnant with our second.
That meant I was navigating a brand new city, trying to build a business from scratch, trying to make friends as an adult in an unfamiliar place, and also just trying to survive being pregnant with a three-year-old.
And that was really, really hard.
I did not want to show up during either of those seasons. Not for photos, not for networking, not for any of it.
I created self-portraits during that time because I knew, even then, that I needed to.
Not because I felt good about how I looked (shocker: I didn’t). Because I knew the future version of me was going to need the proof that I showed up.
When I look back at those images now, I don’t see someone falling apart. I don’t see someone barely holding it together.
I see someone who was in the thick of it, taking it day by day, still showing up for herself no matter what was happening.
Those aren’t bad images. They’re evidence.
Here’s what I want you to hear, and I want you to really hear it:
You don’t have to love every photo that’s taken of you. You just have to have them.
Because the version of you on the other side of this hard chapter, the one who has integrated everything you’re going through right now, who has the perspective and the distance and the wisdom that only comes from having lived through something, that version of you is going to want to look back and see the proof.
The proof that it was hard. That you were here. That you had the strength to move through it.
The images from our hardest seasons don’t freeze us in the worst moment.
They prove we had the strength to survive it.
The woman at the table got that.
When she finally looked back at those images she hated, she didn’t see pain frozen in time.
She saw her own resilience looking back at her. She saw someone who showed up for herself even when she didn’t want to.
She saw how strong she truly was.
That’s what photographs from the hard chapters actually are.
Not a record of suffering. Evidence of presence.
So if you’re in a season right now that you’d rather not document, I want to gently push back on that instinct.
Let someone photograph you anyway. Create the self-portraits. Take the snapshots.
Show up even when it doesn’t feel like the right time.
Especially then.
The version of you who comes out the other side is going to be glad you did.
If this resonated and you’re curious about what working together looks like, start with a Curiosity Call. Fill out the form below to book.
And if you know of a room, a podcast, a stage, a table full of people who need to hear this conversation, let me know. This is a conversation I want to take beyond the studio.