Columbus OH with Chip Willis & Lior Allay
CAPTION FOR THE VIDEO ABOVE:
Hi friends! Welcome to another week of things on my website! I am recording this the same time as last week’s vlog because this week I am out of town and probably won’t have time to do computer things because I’m helping my Granny out again, so that’s why this video is similar to last week’s video.
This week I’m sharing some photos that Chip Willis took of me… Lior Allay is in a couple of them, but it’s mostly photos of me from when Lior and I traveled to Columbus Ohio in fall 2019. We met up with Chip and he got us this motel that was nearby and it was a cool funky spot and we just created a bunch of stuff in the motel room and it was actually really fun. I had never met Chip before but I have a lot of friends who have worked with Chip and I’ve heard a lot of really amazing things about him, and they were all true because he was really awesome. He was a cool dude, so it was fun actually meeting him after seeing his work for years and years and a lot of my friends having already met him, so that was cool. Yeah we just hung out at this motel and took photos and um… Lior took some behind the scenes photos while we were shooting so I have those to share with you also. There is no video this week, well other than this one I’m making right now. The photos and BTS photos from the shoot with Chip… there’s a lot there, so I know you can spend a bunch of time looking through all of that. So I figured it would be ok to not have a video this week.
First look people… I have… so that same trip to Columbus when Lior and Jacs Fishburne and I were creating together, we all shot each other. This week I’m sharing Lior’s photos that they took of me and Jacs from when we were visiting Jacs, also in Columbus. That includes behind the scenes video.
Uhm yeah I don’t think I have very much else to say because that’s all I’m sharing this week and like nothing has changed since I made the last video because I literally am making this one like 2 minutes after I made the last one. But.. I just wanted to say yall are awesome and I appreciate yall being here and you are the reason that I’m able to do any of this at all. I am continuously feeling into what I want to do next, because as I’ve told you before, I haven’t really created much this year. I haven’t felt motivated or inspired to do so. To be honest, I probably very much need therapy and help with… how can I say… processing the traumas that I have experienced. Because I’m very good at avoiding my feelings and distracting myself from all of the things. I think part of why I haven’t really wanted to create this year is because I’ve been feeling a lot of difficult things and that’s been pushing my breaks in terms of wanting to create anything. I think another part of it is white guilt. You know, with all of the systemic oppression and inequalities that have been made painfully obvious through everything that’s happened this year in 2020. I’ve kindof really felt like I need to take a step back and let a lot of other people have the spotlight. As a white person I don’t want to take up too much space because I’ve taken up a lot of space for my whole life, and white people have taken up a lot of space for centuries. I would like to uplift people that are not white and while I do know that my work is important and valuable and worthy of people knowing about it, with the way that I’ve been feeling and with everything else going on in the world, I just haven’t felt like it was important to create for me personally, for a little bit. I mean it is important to create. The things I have created this year, I haven’t shown yall any of it. I haven’t created much, but I have created a couple of things, I haven’t really shared much of it. And that’s okay.
For a long time I have let having a website like this make me feel like I have to constantly be creating and sharing and doing… because if there are people that are paying for access to my stuff, then I need to have stuff to give you access to. I have over 12,000 photos and over 2,000 videos that are already accessible to you here. Even if you’ve been a member for a really long time, you might not have seen everything. There’s a lot to see. I don’t want to push myself too hard to the point of burnout, because I think that’s already where I am. When I went on my cross country road trip I took so many photos and videos and I definitely did burn myself out. I haven’t recovered from my burnout still and it’s been a year. I don’t know what this means for my creative future or the future of this website, but I do know that I want to continue having a place where I can have uncensored content that people can access because I think that’s really important, especially considering how shitty social media is now. But I no longer feel the urgent need to create constantly and be putting out new stuff constantly, because that’s basically just another symptom of white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism that I don’t want to buy into anymore. It’s okay to take a break. It’s okay to not do work. It’s okay to freakin rest and take a nap and slow down. So I’m trying to really… be gentle with myself and not pressure myself to do anything if I’m not feeling like it. Basically this whole year I’ve not felt like creating so I’m not going to be hard on myself for that. Like I’ve said in the past, I do still have a lot of content that yall haven’t seen that is from my backlog so I’ll continue putting that out. I don’t know how long that is going to last, it’ll probably last at least another couple of months. For now, I’m still feeling into what comes next for me and I don’t know what that means, and that very potentially means lots of changes, like big shifts in the future, I just don’t know what that is. I’ll continue giving you a head’s up about it I guess. I feel like I’ve said that so many times, but I still haven’t figured it out, and that’s okay, so I’m just gonna keep letting you know.
I love you so much, thank you for being here, it means the world that you support me even when I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I mean who really actually knows what they’re doing, to be honest. I love you. Thank you. I’ll talk to you next week. Bye!
All members:
click here to view the 100 image photoset of me (& some with Lior Allay) taken by Chip Willis
click here to view the 34 BTS photos Lior took during the shoot
Click here for access to my archive of 12,500+ photos & 2,000+ videos
Click here for the passwords, they change the 1st of every month
First Look/All Access members:
click here to view the 9 image photoset that Lior Allay took of me & Jacs Fishburne in Columbus OH fall 2019
click here to view 11 minutes of BTS video