I had a dream that was like an ill-conceived alternative Japanese video game. I was floating twenty-five or thirty feet above the ground, and people kept tossing me things—all kinds of things. I remember wondering if I actually had any sort of responsibility to catch them, to try and hold onto all of those things that came at me—or if I should have been avoiding them, letting them complete their trajectory and smash back down into the crowd. Either option seemed just as difficult, and for every object I felt like I made the wrong decision. If it was meant to be compared with my waking life, I probably could have just listened to what people were asking me to do and have been just fine. Instead, I was flustered and flailed and made a mess of everything. Much like my waking life.

And a poor one from the phone, again, of course.

I would say that “I don’t know what happened.” How could I go on a 3 hour ride and only take a single crappy iPhone photo—how I could travel to Nebraska and the only photograph I come home with is one someone else takes?  I started to write that, but really—I know exactly what happened.

It was a culmination of frustration, self-doubt, a loss of identity, a lack of understanding and purpose in my work. The things that usually bother all of us at any given moment became what making work was about. The ideas never stopped coming, but the psychological and emotional elements of my process were snubbed out by my insecurities.

I busied myself with fretting about things rather than making them. I wrote a lot, and looking back I did take more photographs than it felt like I was at the time, but the substance of what makes my work mine wasn’t there. And of course that just led me even further away from the work, from myself.

It feels good to be working towards what I should, again. Projects that were on the cusp of being something more than ideas are sitting on my desk actually being something. Comps from yesterday and last month and last year are staring at me waiting to become real. Notes and phone numbers and plans are on little orange post-its and they are filling up my heart and mind just the way they used to.

See you in the Fall, maybe.

Initially I thought I was going to make a project that would be some funny but small sliver of the Canadian identity. Touque (or toque or tuque) being both one of the first Canadian words that I learned and a very common one at that, I figured it was a good place to start. At the end of every winter day I spent in a touque, I was going to photograph its impact on my hair.

Unfortunately, rather than a clever self-reflective social comment it turned into a question of how long it would take me before I cut my hair.