Fuck you, 2014. Rock on, 2015.

Late last night I sat down on my bed with a pen and paper, soft music playing in the background, and let my mind wander.
I reflected on the past year, much like I did in my previous blog post- identifying the problems I encountered, and highlighting the good parts. I then proceeded to write it all down. I wrote down the good parts, the bad parts, the parts I’d been repressing, the parts I’d been reliving. Once I was done, I also wrote down what I hoped for in 2015- what I wanted out of the year, out of myself, and what my wishes were for the coming months.
Once I was done writing this letter to myself, I closed the book. I plan on ripping those pages out without looking at them again, sealing them in an envelope and putting it away, not to be looked at again until January 2016, at which point I will repeat this process, but instead looking back on 2015.

I got this idea from my boyfriend’s mother, who writes this letter to herself every year, evaluating her year and planning for the next.
I found it very therapeutic to do this- to write down, by hand, thoughts that I know I won’t read again for a year. It will be interesting to read this letter in a year and see how my hopes panned out- to reflect and see what changed, what didn’t, what I achieved and what I failed in.
This is a practice that I would like to turn into tradition. Something I now do every year in early January, when the Christmas decorations have been boxed away and the last of the chocolate has been consumed.

One thing I wrote a few times in this letter, which I don’t mind sharing here, as I think I’d rather be reminded of this more regularly than just once a year- is that my biggest hope for 2015 is to be happy. I’m guilty of being one of those people who can tend to rely on others for my own contentedness. I’d like to learn to be happy in myself, without the outside influence of others. I’d like to be able to love myself, to trust myself and to be at peace with who I am as a person.
In order to do that, one of the biggest challenges this year for me, will be to identify what makes me tick- to work out what I want out of life, and to start working towards becoming the person I want to be.
I don’t think life is about finding yourself, I think it’s more about creating yourself. And I think I need to start doing that.

So, 2014 is concluded with the sealing of an envelope, and 2015 is started on a blank page. Time to doodle.

Fuck you, 2014. Rock on, 2015.

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2013: A Recap.

This is the last photo I published to my blog in 2012.
A lot has happened in the months since then, and many moments were captured.

So… here’s my recap of 2013 in pictures…

January

I took my first 50 Week Photo, named “Steaming Mug Of Ice”.

Grant came to visit and we frolicked in the snow…

And I used a 5×4 camera for the first time.

*

February

We celebrated our 1 year anniversary…

And Dom got me some lovely presents…

… and the sun shone for the first time in months.

*

March

We played chess…

Pulled stupid faces…

And spent time with my little girl.

*

April

Grant and I went to see and met Derren Brown.

And sipped free champagne for his 21st!

Oh… and I turned myself into a puppet.

*

May

I dyed my hair orange…

Sweep wore a coat…

We laughed… ❤

Spent time with friends…

And I watched a lot of Dexter… 🙂

*

June

I started rereading all of Harry Potter… (In the bath… ahem)

Summertime started peaking out of hibernation…

I went to Download Festival for the first time…

Finally saw Slipknot live…

Plus Rammstein! (Among others)

And turned myself into an Elf!

*

July

We went to Oxford for my 21st!

Celebrated with Misty…

Tried Jason’s amazing cocktails…

Drank yet more free champagne with these rascals!

Jason, Tav and Grant. 🙂

We saw Cirque Du Soleil: Alegria in London…

I made my first piece of pottery!

And we sunbathed the month away!

*

August

I dyed my hair back to its natural colour for the first time in 5 years!

Dom and I went on our first holiday, and my first one in 7 years!

We went to Venice!

And we had an amazing time!

*

September

We went to Yorkshire and spent time with my “little” brother…

Plus Vladimir the Impaler!

My sister came to stay…

My laptop died right before term restarted…

So I got my first Mac!

Some friends came to Manchester…

And my precious little baby girl sadly lost her fight with cancer…

*

October

I got my new winter coat.

Found the first conkers of the season…

Developed a little obsession with them…

Got dressed up for the Manchester Zombie Walk…

And made brookies!

*

November

I got a surprise present from Dom!

Shot my photographs for the exhibition…

Got the seal of approval for my images from my tutor…

Went to bonfire night at the Alma…

Visited Alton Towers with friends and saw the fireworks!

*

December

I got my business cards…

Spent most of my time getting the exhibition together…

Put up my first Christmas tree in my own home…

Watched Elf with my friends…

Opened my first exhibition of my work…

Went drinking after the exhibition with my fellow photographers…

We had our first Christmas spent together!

And I got Christmas bow ties for all the animals!

I finally got Starbucks to call me “Gandalf”…

And we saw in the New Year in Reading with my lovely sister and her boyfriend.

*

2013 was an absolute whirlwind. Some incredible memories created, new friends made, and sadly some goodbyes too.

I want to wish all my beautiful followers a Happy New Year, and I sincerely hope you all have a great 2014.

❤

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Christmas 2013!

Well, that’s Christmas day over for another year! Still got New Year’s Eve coming up, which I will be spending with my boyfriend at my sister’s new house. So we’ve still got some celebrations to be had!

This year I spent Christmas with my boyfriend for the first time- we’ve been together for almost two years now and have been living together for over a year, so it was awesome to spend Christmas day with him and his family. 

Exposure13 was a massive success- we had our opening night on the 12th December and we had such a good turn out, and many of the artists got a lot of attention and interest in their work- maybe even some print sales!

I’m relieved that the exhibition is now done, but there’s still a lot to get done before I graduate- only a few months left now. I will be working next year primarily on a magazine I am launching for the university, along with two dissertations. Next year will be a little crazy! I also need to start preparing for leaving uni- getting job applications out, CVs written and where I’m gonna live sorted. 

I will do a more comprehensive post before the New Year I think. I felt like I just needed to write a little something on here as I’ve been neglecting pretty much everything other than the exhibition for the last few months- which means my blog has gotten a little dusty, along with my Flickr page and my personal photography… which I need to sort out and pick back up as soon as I can. I want to finish my 52 week project but I feel it’s hardly worth it now that I’ve gone so long without posting… but hey I can just consider it a …. very long holiday? 😛

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and have something awesome planned for the New Year!

xoxo

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2013: Half-Way.

 

Well, now that it is a little over the half-way point in this year, I thought it was a good idea to maybe do a little life update and ‘review’ of the year so far, haha.
At the beginning of the year, I had a few resolutions. One of them was to be healthier. This has both worked and… not. 😛 I have been eating pretty well, but I’ve been slacking exercise wise. However, in September I plan on buying an exercise bike for the spare room. The reason for this is because it works out cheaper than going to the gym and paying a membership fee. Plus, I can work out anytime I want, three times a day if I wish. I will have the motivation necessary knowing I don’t have to put any effort in to get to my exercise location, haha.

Another resolution was to have a night a week where I had a technology free night, with no phone, no laptop and no TV. This has not worked in the slightest. I haven’t had even one of these nights. 😛
However, the aim of this night a week was to force me into doing something creative more often, like spending time just me and my camera, or a notepad for poetry or crafts, or even just reading; and I’ve done these things.
Even without the aid of an evening a week, I’ve managed to do all these things anyway. Since out of university for summer I’ve written a bunch of poems in my spare time (something I never do unless it’s for my course), and I’ve been doing my weekly photo project, which has had me working on my photography regularly too. I’ve also been reading a lot more. I absolutely love reading; it’s one of my favourite things to do, but I found that in the last year or two at university, I’ve just not been making time for it. Any spare time I had, I wasn’t spending it reading. I’ve really changed that. Since the beginning of the year I’ve read seven or eight books in total. Which, considering in the whole of last year I read maybe half of three separate books, and none the whole way through, I thought was pretty good going.
I’ve also been doing crafty things, and really enjoying them! I finally finished customising a denim jacket I started on last year and then forgot about, and now it looks awesome! I also went to Art in Action this month, which is an art festival with workshops down south. There I made a clay Green Man mask and it looks amazing. I’m really proud of it as I’ve never really done any clay molding before then!

My final resolution was to DO things more. Last summer, I spent most of it doing… nothing. We had so many plans and so many things we wanted to do, but we found that money limitations and weather really restricted what we could do. This summer, I wanted to do ALL of the things I had planned. And I’ve definitely been busy!
We kicked off the summer by redecorating our house. Its just a student house, but it’s also somewhere we have to live in for two years, and I wanted it to be somewhere I enjoyed being. So we completely revamped everything, and now it looks awesome!
After that, we went to Download Festival! And boy, can I tell you… it was INCREDIBLE. I finally got to see Slipknot play live after wanting to for over ten years, so that was a dream come true. Plus all the other bands I saw were amazing. It was such an incredible experience, despite the torrential rain and the very unreliable tent. I met awesome people and generally had an awesome time!

These last two weeks I’ve spent with my family down south for my 21^st, which was really awesome. We went to see Cirque du Soliel: Allergria in London, something else I’ve been wanting to do for over a decade and I finally did! I also got to spend some time with my nieces who are adorable and I don’t get to see often now that I’m living so far away.
It was lovely to spend time with everyone and I had such a blast the whole time.

Next week we are going to Venice for a few days courtesy of Dom’s parents for his 21^st, which is incredible and I am so excited for! This will be the first time I’ve been out of the country in seven years, so I am really really looking forward to it! Plus I’ve ALWAYS wanted to go to Venice. We’re going for three days which will be really awesome! I may even manage to get a tan for once!

We are also planning a trip to Wales at some point in August for a long weekend to see Dom’s old hometown and his friends and stuff- something else we wanted to do last summer but couldn’t in the end. So that should be awesome if we can sort that out! I also plan on going to see my friends and family in Yorkshire in August and have a belated celebration for my little brother’s 16^th birthday which is tomorrow!
To finish off the summer, we are planning a big house party right before we start back at uni for our final year, which should be amazing if we can pull it all together in time!

Overall, I think I’ve done really well in my maintaining of resolutions! And I’ve had the best summer so far! I passed my second year with a 2:1 and I’m looking forward to my final year as a student! I think it may be the best yet!

Overall, this year has been great so far! I feel like a lot of stresses and toxic negativity has been lifted from our lives from last year, and that this year has overall just been better! Here’s hoping the second half is just as good! ❤

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The Future’s Bright…

Today I was reflecting on the past year of this little adventure known as “my life”. I was thinking back to this same day, a year ago.
Where was I then? Or rather, who was I then? Well…

By the beginning of June 2011, I was at the start of the end of the worst relationship of my life. You’d have thought I’d have been ecstatic? No. The opposite. As far opposite as you can be from ecstatic, was me. As far as I was concerned, this was the end, not of the two year long hell worthy prison with the tag “boyfriend”, but of life itself.
This guy was everything to me. Poor, pitiful me. He had broken my heart countless times; hell he’d even blown his nose on it and stamped it into the ground for good measure, and yet I couldn’t help but love him.
So there I was, heart broken yet again, unable to see any way out of my self-pitying, endless torment, acting like I was the only person on the face of the entire Earth to experience such pain.

Of course, I wasn’t. Countless people have been through this- the break up you never wanted to happen, watching the other person move on without so much as a glance backward. While all you’re doing in the way of “coping” is looking through old photos, thinking nostalgically of “well… there were SOME good times?”, torturing yourself over social networking activity and trying desperately not to text/call/email. And drinking. A lot.

The self pity stopped after a few weeks and I eventually got on with my life.
This is the point where we start reflecting: If you had told me then, that in just a year’s time, I’d have a year of University under my belt, a tonne of new friends, a new relationship (and the best relationship I could ever ask for, I might add) and a life that actually feels like I’m living it, rather than just watching it pass by? I’d have never believed you. And yet here I am. Typing this. Reflecting on how much I’ve grown since then; grown up out of teenage-hood and into adulthood, and grown overall as a person.

Turns out, I could survive it. And I could even bring myself to trust someone else again, and love them even more than I’d loved previously. I could survive being a student and I could survive moving to the other end of the country, where I knew no one, completely independently.

With this growth, I’m safe with the knowledge of one certainty; if I can survive those things, how hard can the rest be?

A year ago I thought my life had come to an end. Now I know that my life is just beginning. The future’s bright, if you only open your eyes wide enough to see through the tears of the present.

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Photography

To speak technically, Photography is the art of writing with Light. But if I wanted to think philosophically, I can say that Photography is the art of writing with Time. When you capture an image, you capture not only a piece of space, you also capture a piece of Time. So you can have this piece of specific Time in your square or rectangle. In that sense, I find that Photography is more to do with Time than with Light.

To me, Photography is an expression of Life.

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