"I lost all my creativity and inspiration..." - An Honest Journal Series by Heather
...did that title shock you?
I'm going to be very real and honest in this blog post...
A few months ago, I was right in the middle of a terrible time with my attitude. I became dissatisfied with the way our business was going. I lost my creativity, my drive, my inspiration was just gone. I was just trying to push through it, get a post up every day, but it was like torture because at one time this was my passion, my life, what I wanted to think of day and night.... and suddenly, here I was dreading it. (I mean, I have a dream job, that's just ridiculous, right?)
I had heard stories of this happening to others, but never thought it would happen to me...and here it was happening to me.
I do want to say that anytime we came to a shoot or a wedding and I was in there capturing these moments, my inspiration always came back during that time, but all other moments involved with being a photographer (the emails, the day to day tasks, the editing process, prepping our gear for a shoot, sharing about shoots, blogging, shipping out USBs and albums to our clients, being inspired to learn more and become better at photography...) all of this had become absolutely dreadful to me and for a time I thought I just wanted it to all go away.
(As I read this to myself and hear myself say this it's like "WHAT?" how can you say something like that? What led you to have this kind of attitude to lead you to be so unappreciative and ungrateful? It was because it had become a chore and not a joy to me anymore... I lost my inspiration for it and that was a really scary thing for me. But why did this happen? I'll get into that later in this post...)
This year has been extremely weird with bookings, everything was off, and let me tell you... having a non-steady income is stressful sometimes. Mix that with still shooting a ton, being super busy with just LIFE stuff, and life stuff has picked up a lot since we've moved. In a good way, but when you own a house with land and a garden, and pets and you're renovating and doing a lot of it DIY, and you have work and all this life stuff, and church, and you have friends and family that you want to spend time with - all of this takes extra time and money.
Here's where I'm going with all of this, and here's my point of realizing what happened and why I had gotten into this situation with my attitude on things...
I became ungrateful. (How could this happen??)
I wasn't thankful.
Sure, I was "thankful" when we booked a wedding, sure I was "thankful that I get to do what I do". But... I wasn't thankful for everything as a whole. The whole package. The up's the down's, all of it. When it all became too much and I was overwhelmed, I was busy, I didn't remain thankful. When it came to not having a free weekend and I just really wanted to be home, my inner introvert was taking over, I wasn't thankful. When we weren't bringing in the amount of money I had hoped to bring in for the month. I didn't still choose to be thankful. I chose to not be thankful and that bad attitude led to me losing my inspiration, my joy of photography as a whole, and my creativity. I was sinking.
...and guess what? This cycle of a bad attitude only made things worse.
It wasn't until God helped me to break out of that cycle, and I made the choice to be thankful in ALL things that little by little, my inspiration came back, my joy of it all came back, my creativity started coming back, my ideas have started coming back. I'm excited about photography again. Life is coming back.
Not happy about having to do something? Choose to be thankful. Feeling overwhelmed? Choose to be thankful. Can't pay the bills this month? Choose to be thankful. An attitude of thankfulness is more powerful than we realize. When we choose not to be thankful, that can lead us down a dangerous path and before we know it we're in a place we never thought we'd be in. An attitude of ungratefulness can be more dangerous than we realize.
“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”
So I choose to be thankful no matter what the circumstances are. No matter what, we're blessed, we're loved, and we've got so much to be thankful for.
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”
“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
