10,000 photos and a whole box of journals

What aspirations for 2024 matter more than peace and love?

I'll admit, I use Vocal as a sounding block mostly and in difficult times barely at all. I work hard to craft my stories in a way that I can get my mental health in order as I build out the parameters of the challenges I enter. The Challenges are certainly what keeps me hanging on.

Let's be honest with one another, in this time we have together.

I am tickled mostly that your eyes will see this and bear witness, to my words. I am equally as tickled with the fancy that I might win one of these days. Maybe that day is today or some other day in 2024. Either way I ride the dopamine and serotonin from the possibility that I might win right into the days and that feels pretty good. Why don't I enter more? Why don't I try harder on Vocal to succeed?

In the 2 years I have been a member of this community it has been difficult to remain motivated in consistently publishing my work and finding new readers. Shameless self promotion for what? A penny and a pat on the back? I didn't get into it for the money. I guess I was not actually valuing my own writing very highly when I started. At least certainly not enough to think I could support myself with it. I got into writing because I had a traumatic happening; happen which jarred my brain in such a way that I needed help. That help told me I needed to journal even though journaling is one of the hardest things I have found to do in this world.

This was supposed to be aspirational, I can only see how terribly low my self-confidence has gotten. Maybe I just need Vocal this year to help me to fill my own cup? It could be that my commitment to Vocal for 2024 is just to become more consistent in showing up for myself on this platform.

One day, I stumbled over here while bumbling aimlessly around the internet searching for purpose. I suspect I am not alone in doing this. There was a big challenge, and to be real with you, $1000 is life changing money the same way that $10,000 is life changing money. The idea that this money could be earned through my writing was initially outlandish in my thoughts. I thought there was really no one out there who would want to read what I had to write. Most of the time I hastily convey too much. I was once asked how I put so much emotion into my words. I laugh at the thought because my main goal is simply that, it is my voice, you hear, when you read my entries. Above all, in all of my writing I try to include the genuine sincerity with which I am writing on whatever topic strikes me. I am trying to be a better person, a mentally healthy person, the exercise is just writing, after-all, there is nothing to fear.

The one type of journal I have been semi-consistent in keeping over time is generally my travel journals. If you saw this box of journals in my office, and the abysmal number of articles I have written and published on Vocal you might just think I am a little crazy or just somewhat lazy. I have so much content to publish and until I found Vocal I had no starting point for this massive task. I am overwhelmed constantly by my own body of work. It feels like a behemoth of memories that follows me along through the day to day like a shadow. If I could just diligently tick away at digitizing these journals and photographs one of them is sure to take, sometime, somewhere, I just know it. As long as I put it out there and have faith in my own ability, it will be fine. I need to release my writing from the confines of simple challenges and let the globetrotter within me expound upon all that has been beautiful and desolate about the places I have already gone to make way for the places I am sure to go.

All of those dictations and documentations of a life well lived thus far should not go to waste. These glimmers of my old life seem to languish on the pages with the passage of time. All these thousands of photos and countless number of journals haunt me and heckle me.

To be fair, most entries are just shoot lists of destinations and maybe a couple of poems or tidbits of memories I thought future Abbey would need. A ton of it is written poems, language learning notes and prayers for the Universe. I never stopped being a monk in this world since 2013 and these journals uphold my connection with spirit just as much as they uphold my duties as an artist on the lam.

When I consider how much work went into the creation of all this, it makes me anxious. How brazen an individual to take an epic journey only so far as hiding it away from the rest of the world upon completion. Not once or twice mind you, 10,000 photos and a box of journals worth of artistic pilgrimage collecting dust as I forge ahead on other tasks, day in and day out.

Each day that passes without much to show for all that I have already done in this world feels like a bad investment on my part. Where is my ROI from myself? I see it in my studio when I am there, I see it in the garden throughout the year, and yet it seems unsatisfying because there is always so much more to do to follow-through on any one of the many projects, to the point that it seems like a ripe tide on the shores of Lake Michigan. I get sucked in quickly.

I need a secretary, I am the secretary. The recorder of these happenings, the documentarian of my own life, though I only have these two hands. I need a mother's little helper, a cocktail and a cigarette to get through all of the past information as well as all that continues to come in consistently, and that is just the paperwork side of it all.

It is clear every January that I have not chosen an easier path through this life. I am sure that is for a reason, though that reason alludes me some days. When we are younger and our elders ask us what we will be I never wavered. I am an artist and I have worked really hard to get that studio, to get those seasonal contracts, to be my own administration, sales, production and marketing. I have cultivated out of this mud to the point of being my own boss and it feels pretty good, until I realize I haven't paid myself in months. I don't go out anymore because I am always working for money that I can only enjoy through the auspices of more work, and reinvestment into the studio.

You probably would think my rant is for naught if you saw any one of these photos from my journeys. There are thousands of them. So many photos that I have gone blind to them. I try to edit and organize them every single year, every year I hardly make a dent in the rolls. Every year that passes is another missed opportunity to share my art with the world. The fact is there's 20 plus memory cards and countless undeveloped rolls of film that encapsulate most all these eyes armed with my trusty cameras have seen in this world.

A larger truth is that my journey here on Vocal is what leads me to the strength I need to rehash all of the journeys I have already trekked so I can finally relinquish a body of work to pay these bills and fund the next portion of the greater journey. I need to channel my inner Walter Mitty; I need buckle down and get to work. Before I can do that I need to believe in my own work; I need to believe that it is not a waste of your time or mine. I need to believe that there is someone else out there who wants to read what I am writing on Vocal without commercial interruption. Someone who takes the opportunity to tip me directly for the service. Someone who interacts to let me know they see me over here tip tapping along.

To relive exhilarating times, and regale my readers with all that I have seen as a wild photographer through these years is certainly a goal as well as a missive in the greater 2024 annual plan. I take my time between contracts to edit the photos and populate the galleries of their own website. This takes time and focus. Just yesterday I was worried about not having more studio time and getting to work on these revenue streams for my art. Vocal means so much in the larger scheme of getting my art into the world. I know that when there is a story to accompany a photograph; that photo becomes worth about a million words, rather than the standard thousand.

It really did not click to me until I started this novel over the summer. It wasn't initially meant to be a novel and then I realized how much was really clouding around in my brain space. I needed to clear my head and there was no better outlet than just letting my fingers do what they wanted on the keyboard. When I got out on to the table what I needed to get out I opened the floor to my inner child. It was really remarkable to allow my inner child the ability to get out and celebrate all the little weird quirks that have made me who I am today. It has been wholesome and cathartic to put this into practice in my writing. More importantly it guides me to more action on following through with something and finishing some of these side projects ASAP.

It is funny to me, this challenge seems to be just what I needed at this very moment. It is necessary to game plan a come-up, to sort one's thoughts for success and suss out any of the self-deprecation. I reluctantly, submitted a chapter from my novel into a challenge not long ago and for the first time on Vocal it was recognized. I won $50 by following through and submitting something that had come from my voracious desire to heal myself through a creative medium that I don't generally excel at. My brain was jacked when I opened that email. Akin to hitting a strike in bowling. This was chemical happiness that I was producing for myself! All because there is someone else out there reading what I am writing for my own mental health. There is someone that saw the merit in my writing, and to that person I am grateful.

Two of my classes for this semester were cancelled yesterday due to low enrollment. That is a 1/3 of my creative business' income for the months of January to March that I lost to low-enrollment in a matter of minutes. I did gain time in the loss, the time I was worried I would not have; if I am to find a silver lining. Then in my frustration I thought why not see if there are any life changing challenges over here on Vocal. When I read this challenge I knew I am a Vocal member for a reason.

If you are keeping up there are thousands of photographs and a box full of journals that I now have the time to buckle down and publish to make the ends meet this year, preferably in the near immediate future.

Thank you to Vocal for providing the exact canvas I need to follow through on something over here in 2024. Here's to believing someone else is out there waiting to read it to provide the pressure I need to step-up in this regard.

Love. Life. Art. Gratitude.