The Season the Lights Went Off
There was a season in my career where everything felt like it was finally happening. Big work. Real money. Shoot after shoot, like waves of good fortune. I felt like I'd arrived.
And then the calls stopped. It was like a switch turned off. No treatments, no inquiries, nothing. For months and months.
If you've ever tied your whole identity to your work, you know what that silence does. Every week that went by with nothing, I felt rawer. More unraveled. Like someone was peeling me like an onion, layer by layer, and I couldn't make it stop. I wasn't just losing work. I was losing my sense of who I was.
What hit hardest wasn't even the career. It was the identity I'd built around being a self-made, financially independent woman who could do and go and be whatever she wanted. I felt like I was losing her. That was the hardest thing my ego has ever had to sit with.
It took a long time to rebuild. To trust myself again, to find my creativity again, and I'm still working at it. Honestly, I'm still not back at that peak, and I don't know if I ever will be. I've had to make peace with that. But after that spiral, I'm grateful for every single job in a way I wasn't before. I'm still making a good living doing work I love. And I've learned that the highs and lows in this industry aren't a sign something is wrong with you. They're just part of it. Nobody talks about that part.
So if you're in a quiet season right now and feeling that unraveling feeling, you aren't failing. You aren't done. You're just in the hard part, and you aren't alone.