Hallucinating…

Tonight, I tried it, but failed miserably at it. Am I a coward? Perhaps. I don’t know whether there is anything known as an “easy death”, but I think death is not really the end of the suffering. I understand and totally know that this brings with it a lot of unanswered questions & a lot of unsaid answers to the family, friends and whoever that might have known you, but there are moments when it all just gets a little too much to handle.

Things haven’t been too well. Life hasn’t been well, but then again whose life is? It feels like a struggle each day from the moment I wake up till the time I sleep, it feels like a chore… Don’t know how long this will go on for. I’m not even sure how long would I be able to hold on for.

Am I hallucinating?

I failed. Again!

 

Tonight, I had slept early. Maybe I was tired or just wanted to rest, I am not sure. But, I fell asleep with the phone in my hand as is generally the case. If I am home, the phone is my friend and gives me constant company when I am not working. And then, an email notification suddenly woke me about 15 minutes back.

I failed tonight. Again. For the Nth time in my life, and each time I fail I lose a little bit of me. You see, a big project that I was working on and was absolutely sure I shall get to do, slipped through my hand tonight. Those 5 lines of email jolted me out of my peaceful sleep like an earthquake would! It’s not that such things haven’t happened in the past. Being in the creative industry, I have faced such failures time & again, but each time it happens, it feels like the first time. The result, essentially, is always the same – every time you fall short of achieving your goal, I fall back and go into deep self-critical role. And THEN, it becomes absolutely impossible and difficult to let go of all that negativity – the negative energy that I feel right at this moment about it all as I pen these words down (or rather, type this down).

As demotivated as I am right now, I think I need to boost my morale by building self-acceptance and through this blog post, I want to help everyone who has ever been through failure in their respective lives. I think, when we hold a negative perception of ourselves,  it is not surprising to feel lost, defeated and like a huge failure in life. Each obstacle, mistake or failure can seem like proof of what we already know, that we won’t succeed and that it is not okay. What we need to do when we feel demotivated or depressed is we need to learn to give priority to ourselves and value ourselves We need to focus on valuing who we are and NOT what you do.

During all these years working as a creative professional, I’ve also come to realize that when we look to our accomplishments for validations of whether we are “worthy” or not, our sense of feeling good about ourselves depends completely on those achievements of life, which, frankly speaking, is a little too harsh.

Yes, I feel terribly upset tonight, yes, I feel dejected & like I’ve failed big time but I also know that with self-acceptance and identifying the issues, I will be fine. I would, at this point in time, love to brag about having truly supportive & compassionate friends but truth be told – they are more like ‘acquaintances’ than friends; I have absolutely NO true friends whom I can fully trust or be open with about my issues. It’s not that I don’t have “friends”. But, those who really care are only a few (less than the number of fingers I have on one hand!). 🙂

At the end of the day, after some thought, self-pity and what not, I have come to realize that persistence is the key to anything in life, and each time I fail, I somehow motivate myself by different means after I am done feeling dejected. This time too, I need to do the same. I need to be persistent. With persistence, no matter what my goals are, I shall increase my chances of achieving them in life…

Deriving Motivation || The Art of Photography

 

 

Photography, they say is an art. It takes a lot of hard work and an eye for detail to create some dramatic pictures; pictures which would not only be stunning to look at but pictures which would tell a story, so to speak. But, all this creative thinking does take a toll on the mind, and your mental state to some extent, if I may put it that way. You see, photography as a hobby and as a business are two different things altogether. When one pursues it as a hobby, all one need to do is just go out without really any particular agenda (although it always helps to have a aim in mind before just randomly getting trigger-happy) and create pictures; pictures which make YOU happy and perhaps keeps your creative juices flowing. However, when it comes to the business end of photography, that is where things start to get a little dicey & to a certain extent dirty.

The general consensus is that a photographer just creates pictures and earns money out of it (preferably big bucks), whereas the truth couldn’t be further apart. The actual photo-shoot which I talk about is just a mere 25% of it while the rest 75% of the work includes a lot of running around, client meets, hours and hours worth phone-calls, some more meetings, some haggling around with the clients for “best prices” (and what not!), and if they appreciate your work or if you get ‘lucky’, you might end up getting the assignment. Apart from all this, we, the bunch of professional photographers also need to constantly be on our toes when it comes to inspiration and deriving motivation. I derive my motivation from nature, by taking long walks with the camera, or perhaps with just my cell-phone, using the phone’s camera as best as I can. I just soak it all in, rather than sitting infront of a PC and going through other photographers’ work tirelessly. Yes, that is something which I do, from time to time, but I don’t make it a point to soak it all in to an extent that I start to go crazy about it. You see, what happens when you keep on looking at other people’s work so obsessively is that it somehow slows you down to an extent that it might even start to affect your own work in a negative manner. It might even depress you! I know, because I have dedicated a few years of my life doing just that; going through people’s work from all over the world and trying to gauge how exactly did the said photographer photographed it, forgetting that nothing can be a better teacher than going out and actually creating pictures.

Inspiration is a good thing, I am not denying the fact. But, inspiration when becoms an obsession, all it will end up giving you is a mild heart-attack, perhaps even panic attacks. What I would suggest you do, if you need inspiration, has got nothing to do with photography, actually. You go out, take a walk, go watch a movie, listen to music, take a long stroll through a park, meet your friends, talk to them about anything BUT photography, go on a date. Do whatever you might feel will relax your mind, will calm you down. Because, once you are relaxed, ideas start to flow. Atleast, that’s what I do whenever I feel a little pressurized by the “business of photography”, if I may. You’ll notice a drastic and positive change in your photography when you learn how to relax that mind of yours. I speak from personal experience; just wanted to share this here so that anyone who feels lost and doesn’t quite know how to improve their work can understand fairly clearly, how exactly to do that. Improving one’s work, be it any creative genre has actually got nothing to do with that exact art-form. Rather, inspiration must be derived from something else; anything which you might think can inspire you.

I have given up thinking about how much money I have been earning or what my family thinks about my profession, or what everyone thinks of me. Instead, I just create pictures because I love doing so. And by love, I really mean I LOVE it! That passion, that love for photography is something which I cannot even begin to describe in words. So, if you want to get into photography professionally, for only fame & money, trust me, you’d get nowhere. You need to first understand that photography in itself is something which you do for your own satisfaction rather than filling your pockets with dough or to satisfy people who, perhaps, do not even care about photography at all.  As for me, I feel really good that I am in a profession which, perhaps, many of us dream of but only a handful of us have the guts to go ahead and actually do what we’ve wanted to do all our lives. For, regret is something which I do NOT want to have. 🙂

Happy clicking.