jumping off the deep end

So here are some thoughts:

1) I am a little tired of doing commercial work these days. I just feel that I get overwhelmed with deadlines and then I don't do anything that excites me and I just fall back on things I know work and I know are good enough. Plus I have been having to shoot in terrible spaces lately that just depress me when I edit them. Seriously why are all events held in dark dreary places? Why??

2) I have decided that the reason I can't make solid work that I love has nothing to do with a lack of ideas. In fact i know exactly what kinds of photos i want to make. in fact i have about 5 thousand images in my head waiting to be made. The problem is instead a matter of being at the wrong place in my life right now. (Actually in writing that down maybe that is exactly what i need to be photographing right now.) All I want to do is be a part of a family and have children in my day to day life so that I can really photographs from the inside of that world looking out rather than my current dilemma of being on the outside looking in. I want to make photographs like Sally Mann, Tierney Gearon, or even the woman who does this blog. It is SO frustrating to know what I want and simply not have the materials I need. I might as well not have a camera with how stuck I feel. I need to photograph the girls I nanny for more but even then, we go so long without seeing each other it is hard to be up to date on them and their lives enough to really capture their real personalities.

3) I need to get over this issue because my life is not rocketing toward parenthood anytime soon. Maybe I will start photographing all the times in my life that their is an absence of family? That feels really forced but maybe that is what I need to do... force myself to get over all this whining.

4) I am also freaking out a bit because I have come to the realization that this is the last photography I will take...maybe ever. That is terrifying. It is a passing of the baton from external forces pushing me to photograph to relying on my own internal drive. I can't decide if that will be relieving and freeing or overwhelming and crippling. I guess next semester will be a good test because I will still be able to be in the lab alot without actually having to be there. I feel very much like I am standing on the edge of something and I can't decide if I am going to jump or wobble here for a while.