A Childhood Spent Searching
As a child, I was endlessly curious. I looked through keyholes whenever I could. I watched people when they thought no one was paying attention. I wanted to know what happened behind closed doors, how families lived when the world wasn't watching, why one person seemed to move through life with effortless joy while another carried a sadness no one else appeared to notice.
I wanted to understand what lived beneath the surface. Sometimes I imagined crawling into someone else's skin just long enough to experience life through their eyes.
Looking back, I realize I wasn't simply curious.
I was searching.
For what, I couldn't have told you then.
Wanting to Become a Surgeon
When it came time to choose a career, I wanted to become a surgeon.
It sounds dramatic now, but it made perfect sense to my teenage mind. I wanted to cut people open to see what was inside them. I thought the answers I was searching for might be hidden somewhere beneath skin and muscle, waiting for someone brave enough to look.
Of course, life had other plans.
Discovering Photography
Instead of medicine, I found photography.
Oddly enough, it wasn't all that different.
When someone steps in front of a camera, they arrive carrying a carefully constructed version of themselves. They know how they smile. They know which side of their face they prefer. They know the expression they believe the world wants to see.
Portrait photography isn't simply about lighting or composition.
It's about trust.
It's about creating an environment safe enough for someone to forget they're being observed.
A portrait is never created by just one person. It is the result of two people meeting in a space where one is willing to be seen and the other is willing to truly look.
The Moments Between Poses
I became fascinated by the moments between poses.
The rehearsed smile would disappear.
Their shoulders would soften.
Their breathing would change.
Something shifted in their eyes.
For the briefest moment, they stopped performing.
And there they were.
Entirely themselves.
That single moment became an obsession.
A Surgeon After All
Years later, while talking with another portrait photographer, I confessed something that had embarrassed me for decades.
"When I was younger," I said, "I wanted to become a surgeon because I wanted to know what was inside people."
He laughed.
"But that's exactly what you're doing."
I had never thought of it that way.
Photography had simply become another keyhole.
Another doorway into the mystery I had been chasing my entire life.
Looking through the viewfinder brought me back to childhood. The same anticipation. The same curiosity. The same excitement of witnessing something hidden.
Only now, I could help create the conditions where those hidden moments appeared.
It felt intoxicating.
I thought I had found the answer.
Motherhood Arrives
Then life quietly took the camera out of my hands and turned it toward me.
Motherhood arrived at thirty-nine.
Like many women of my generation, I had built a career first. Motherhood would simply become the next chapter. Another role. Another experience to fit into the life I had carefully constructed.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
Nothing prepared me for what happened after my daughter was born.
Until then, I had spent decades studying other people.
Suddenly, I became the subject.
My nervous system no longer belonged entirely to me.
Even while she slept, some part of my body remained awake.
Every sound mattered.
Every silence mattered.
Every cry bypassed logic and travelled directly into my body before my mind even understood what was happening.
Discovering Matrescence
Years later I would discover the word matrescence and finally understand that becoming a mother is not simply a social transition.
It is neurological.
It reshapes the brain.
It reorganizes priorities.
It alters the nervous system.
Learning that was comforting.
But it didn't explain why I felt as though my own body knew something my conscious mind had not yet discovered.
Searching for Answers in Biology
Whenever something doesn't make sense to me, I study it.
Perhaps that has always been my way of making peace with uncertainty.
So I began where I felt safest.
Biology.
I immersed myself in nutrition, hormones, deficiencies, inflammation—anything that might explain the overwhelming depletion I was feeling.
The anxiety.
The insomnia.
The exhaustion that no amount of sleep seemed capable of repairing.
When the Colours Came Back
One afternoon, during a vitamin IV infusion, something extraordinary happened.
I burst into tears.
Not because I felt emotional.
Because the colours came back.
Only then did I realize they had slowly disappeared.
The world had become muted so gradually that I hadn't noticed.
Grey had quietly replaced vibrant without asking permission.
When colour returned, it felt like someone had opened the curtains inside my own mind.
It was one of the most profound moments of my life.
I had found an answer.
Or so I believed.
The truth was both simpler and more complicated.
My body had become strong enough to open doors I had only been standing outside of before.
The real work hadn't even begun.
