Everything, All of It, All the Time
There’s a version of this career that lives almost entirely online.
It’s always at the thing. Always traveling to the next thing. Always in the right outfit, in the right room, in the right photo with the right people. It looks, from the outside, like momentum. Like proof of something. Like the shape success is supposed to take.
I speak at these events. I’m not writing this from the outside. I’ve sat on the panels, on the stages, I’ve worn the outfits, I’ve gotten on the planes. I’m in this industry, not throwing rocks at it.
But I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I want to say something honest.
I don’t actually know how much of it moves the needle.
Maybe it does. Maybe the right room at the right moment changes everything. I’m not going to pretend I have data I don’t have, or that I’ve run the experiment of doing none of it to compare. Some of it has clearly been good for my work. Some of it I genuinely loved.
But somewhere along the way I started adding it up — the ticket prices, the flights, the hotel rooms, the outfits bought for the photos, the days away, the weeks of recovery — and I started to notice something I didn’t have a word for at first.
It was a distorted, parralel life.
Running parallel to my real one. Demanding its own wardrobe and its own calendar and its own emotional bandwidth. And mostly populated by images of itself.
The thing nobody says out loud is that a lot of it is performance of a career, not the career itself.
The work is the work. The work is the wedding. The work is the planner you’ve trusted for six years and the couple who will look at these photos for the next sixty. The work is the quiet Tuesday when you’re editing alone and nobody’s watching. The work, almost by definition, doesn’t photograph well.
What photographs well is the adjacent thing. The event. The dinner. The clique at the after-party. And because what photographs well is what gets seen, what gets seen starts to feel like what matters. And then you find yourself spending real money and real time and real life chasing the version of the career that exists for the camera.
For what?
I want to be careful here. I’m not saying don’t go.
I’m saying: be selective.
A planner I work closely with talks about this beautifully. She thinks about events in terms of compounding. If she’s working toward something specific — a rebrand, a repositioning, a particular year of intentional growth — she’ll say yes to the things that reinforce each other. Speaking here, attending that, the feature that ties it all together. The events aren’t the strategy; they’re the amplification of one.
That’s a completely different posture than going to everything because everyone else is. One is intentional. The other is grasping.
You can do events. You just have to know why.
A few things I’ve come to believe, that I’d offer gently, because I know how easy it is to feel like you have to be at all of it:
You can say no.
You can be successful in ways that don’t require being seen at everything.
You don’t have to look cool online to be an artist.
You really, really do not have to be in a clique.
Most of us got into this work because we wanted a life we loved. Not a career we performed.
The thing the online version of this industry doesn’t show you is the cost of keeping up with it. The Sunday you didn’t have. The dinner you missed. The morning you were too tired to be present for the people who actually live in your house.
I work hard so I can have a life I enjoy. The life I enjoy is not at a hotel bar in another city in a dress I bought for the photos. The life I enjoy is here. It’s small, and it’s specific, and it’s mine, and I’m not going to trade it for a parallel version of myself that lives mostly on a screen.
You don’t have to either.
That’s the whole thing.
