Something old, something new

As the year comes to a close, we've once again reached that point in time where it's good to sit down, silence ourselves, and reflect on the last 12 months or so. It might be good to grab a journal (if you've been keeping one) and read what stood out to you this year. Maybe it's a good time to simply sit in your favorite place with a hot cup of coffee and think back over the year, the good, the bad, the middling.

For me, this time comes with reflection on the work that I've done over the last year. Things have changed, certainly, since the beginning of 2022, and the way that I work, and even the way that I *think about work*, has changed drastically.

If you're reading this and you've been to my website before (which, thanks, by the way), you might notice that things look a little different here. Well, actually, they look a *lot* different. This was something that was sparked by my yearly reflection, and I think it's a good place to begin as I write this post about where I've been, and where I'd like to go.

## Changing focus

2022 was a good year in my life, all things considered. I've continually been blessed in almost every way imaginable, and I have grown spiritually, personally, and professionally in leaps and bounds, beyond what I had hoped for in the beginning months of this year.

So I'm thankful. And my focus on gratitude has led me to realize something about my creative work here, mainly: I'm thankful for the creative freedom I have here, and I'm beginning to realize that my goals have not taken advantage of that gratitude, which is something I'm seeking to rectify this upcoming year.

See, having a personal website and a freelance creative business is a blessing. Truly! I know it sounds funny to say it, or to think about it for too long, but having the oportunity to *create things,* to take part in that wonderful act of artistic exploration and to share that with the world, that's something that I'm truly, **truly** blessed to be able to do.

And I haven't taken much advantage of it.

This creative freedom is something that isn't afforded to most people, whatever their position may be. Expectations matter. They're given, and they need to be met. Failure is, as cliché as it may be, not an option. But here? On this website frequented by people who get the link in an email from me (shoutout to you if that's where you came from, by the way)? I have all the freedom in the world, to literally do whatever I want.

Failure isn't a thing, because there's no way for me to fail! And this is something that I just haven't realized, in the three years I've been doing this. I've been so focused on building the perfect **business website** to target keywords and marketing strategies and other words that get tossed around at business meetings when people run out of substantial things to say. And at the end of all that effort, research, and work, I just felt...burnt out. And I had lost the sense that I was doing something joyful.

Instead, I was trying to "succeed," but not in the way that actually meant "success" to me.

So I just kind of stopped working on things for a while. I didn't update my website, I didn't write a blog post, I cut down drastically on my posting on social media. And I really reflected: what do I **want**?

## Our space on the web

Let's meander for a moment. Humor me, if you will.

I want to meander back to the earliest days of the modern web. The days of custom mouse cursors, flash games, and websites designed by people who had never heard of the word "minimal," much less had considered it as a design concept (those websites were and still are beautiful, by the way).

This was a time when the Internet was new, fresh, and full of possibilities. New avenues of personal expression and joyful interaction were opening up day after day. Also, I was like, 6, so everything seemed wide open at that point. This period of time was unfortunately brought to an end by the Internet we see today: monopolized, standardized, and almost entirely owned by someone else.

Not all of this is bad, of course. The fact that someone else runs a server farm to run almost all of the essential web services we use today is a good thing, because my laptop can't possibly handle that much traffic. And the massive talent of the engineers that have built the modern web has made a system that is impossibly easy to access, and even easier to gain a foothold on. We have easier connection to the world around us, and I happen to think that's a really good thing.

But what has left us is the chance we all seemed to have at the beginning of the personal web, the chance to make our little plot of digital land truly our own. Instead, we've all taken out rentals on property run by someone else, forced to work within the bounds of systems we had no hand in building, controlled by people who will never hear what we have to say about the direction they're taking.

And now, we're back to my main point.

## The road ahead

"So TJ, you've written this long-winded post about the bygone era of the internet. What's the point? You're a wedding photographer, why should any of us care?"

What a good question, dear reader. And the answer is pretty simple: I'm not sure you **should** care! And that actually reaches the heart of the point that I'm trying to make: we need to break out of our hustles and start making things that we *love* again. This blog post is being written because I care, not because I expect the world to, not because I expect it to do well on Google or Instagram or anywhere else I happen to put it.

I'm writing it, and I'm making everything I make because I **love making it.** And I've noticed that when I fall in love with making things again, every act of creation becomes a joy to partake in, even down to the slog of categorizing my footage after a long day of shooting.

So this website, in its new, present form, is going to be a constantly-changing, ever-growing site that is more of a joyful creative process than a marketing page for freelancing. I'm not changing what I do, I'm still filming weddings, I'm still making commercial videos, all that jazz.

But I'm not doing it because I feel pressured to be "successful" in any common use of the term. I'm doing it because I love it. And I want my personal plot of land here in the wild, wild web to reflect exactly what my mission is: to make cool stuff, and to have a blast doing it.

Trying to present my work in any other way would be, frankly, dishonest.

So if you want to come along for the ride, that's great. I'm going to be writing, photographing, filming, ***making*** things for the joy of making them. And they'll be here, ready to be taken in whenever you so desire to do so.

And if you're wholly uninterested, that's okay, too. Because I'm coming to learn that I don't need to create for the world, or to amass some form of "audience" beyond myself, God, and the people who I'm making it for.

It's freeing, honestly, to be able to create with no boundaries beyond what I put on myself. And I'm planning on putting on very few of them.

This blog will be weird, just like the rest of my site will be. Because I'm a little weird.

And what better place is there to be a little weird than on our very own slice of digital land?