Video & Reflections: Eight Years North

This is a story of finding myself photographically and personally over eight years in Washington

Spoiler warning

My below reflections contain spoilers. It’s not like this is a whodunit mystery with a grand reveal, but there are some moments in this video that I think powerfully wrap up at the end.

Reflections

Multiple cancer diagnoses in my wife’s and my immediate families. A global pandemic. The sudden passing of my Opa, the undisputed patriarch of the family. And yet my wife and I are over a thousand miles north from all of that. Missing out.

The video itself looks over the last eight years, but actually putting this video together took a number of years within and after its time period.

I easily logged hundreds if not thousands of hours put into the story development and editing, starting even before I moved to eastern Washington. Often I worked from sunup well past sundown editing the narrative, script, and video for days at a time. Ultimately in each furious span of days or weeks, I’d reach a stopping point where I had no more story to tell, yet no ending for the video. So I’d put it away for months wondering if it would ever get finished. Much like a lot of my projects.

I thought initially the story would be about my move up from California to Seattle, and ultimately leaving Seattle for eastern Washington, depicting my struggle with creativity and subject matter, wrapping up with my lessons learned along the way. That’s much of part one. Maybe I’d even go as far as to end with giving fellow photographers or creatives some advice when faced with the same situations (barf). But that felt gross, insincere, and really cheapened the whole thing. I’m certainly not at the point in my life where I feel like I should be sharing big life lessons to people on YouTube. Probably (and hopefully) I won’t ever be.

The problem was: I knew I had a story to tell, but I didn’t know that I was in the middle of my story. I did know, however, that I didn’t have an ending. Turns out, it was because it hadn’t actually happened yet.

So the project started and stopped over a number of years — until the ending eventually unfolded, seemingly all at once.

Visiting our family for Christmas in the midst of all these health crises unfolding made it abundantly clear that an affordable, state-income-tax-free lifestyle up north, 3% mortgage rate, quiet pace of life, and beautiful scenery would mean nothing if we lost out on irreplaceable time with our family. Leaving to go back home after that trip became one of the hardest things we’d ever done and it was immediately clear to us: our time up north had come to an end.

That was the story.