I originally wrote this for Patreon on June 24th 2017. I no longer use Patreon and have replaced it with my website (here) but thought I would share some of my old blogs with you for FREE to show my appreciation for you visiting my website! <3

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The new moon supermoon in Cancer is today/tomorrow and oh gosh its bringing about a lot of change for me. It’s both scary and exciting, and I’m ready for it. I don’t think I’ve told you much about my “real” life outside of photography and modeling and want to share some of it with you. Since art doesn’t currently pay the bills and antisocialdisposition is a full time electrical engineering student, it has been essential for me to have a steady income. I’ve been working full time at a major healthcare system for nearly 5 years to support myself and my husband until he finishes his degree.

Well, working in healthcare kinda started killing my soul a little. Slowly.

The first 3 years I was working the front desk at a family practice. I loved my work family, (most of) our patients were so sweet, and the benefits were amazing.

The 4th year I was promoted to the referral coordinator position which was great because it was over a dollar more an hour, but I had to do the work of 2 people. That’s when things started to change for me, I started to not really enjoy coming to work every day like I used to. I was tasked with the job of cleaning up the mess that was made before I was promoted. Trying to condense as much of the story as possible, essentially there was nobody doing referrals for 2 offices for a couple of months before I started, and I had to not only essentially teach myself referrals, I had to catch up with the backlog AND work on the new referrals being added every day. It is so disheartening to know that you’re not doing the best job you could be doing because you have SO MUCH work to do it’s not possible to do it all right. I am not the kind of person that does things half-heartedly. If I do something I want to do it 100%.

I was a referral coordinator for 1 year. In that year I taught myself how to do referrals, I cleaned up the backlog (over 500 referrals between the 2 offices down to about 40 which is doable in a couple of days), and I created cheat sheets for other referral coordinators to use to help them with their work. I felt trapped, underappreciated, and underpaid. That’s why I was fine with moving over an hour away from work. It was a good excuse to look for a job closer to home.

I wanted and got a job in the billing department for the same healthcare system that was about 20 minutes away from our new place. It was NOT the job for me. It’s an extremely monotonous job: printing out EOBs and entering them into the computer. all. day. long. I was there for about 5 months.

Today was my last day working in healthcare. I put my notice in a couple weeks ago after stressing and crying and thinking so much about it. I feel so much better already to not be in a field that I have a lot of problems with. The healthcare system in our country is dismal, and I know first hand how terrible it can be for both patients and those who take care of them. Healthcare needs an overhaul but I wouldn’t even know where to start.

I will be unemployed for 2 weeks, and on July 10th I start my new full time job at the only camera store in town that still develops black and white film in-house. I am so much happier with the direction of my life already and I haven’t even started my new job yet. Obviously photography and modeling are what I’m passionate about and I am so excited for it to be what sustains me monetarily! I am going to learn so much working there and my new knowledge will only enhance the quality of my art. I am so looking forward to it!!! Change can be so so good.

I create as much as I can whenever I can, and your support here on patreon has allowed me to allocate more time to creating than I would be able to otherwise. One day with your help I aspire to support myself full time from my art income. I yearn to travel all over the country to find the most beautiful places and photograph the nude there. My goal for after AD finishes his degree: buy a giant work van, custom build it into a mini home, and create in every national and state park I can find. And you know I’ll be sharing it all here with you. <3

(EDIT 2020: My dreams all came true last year!!! I became full time self employed (via THIS WEBSITE RIGHT HERE, because of the support of members!) in April 2019, and lived out of my minivan for 69 days during a cross country road trip last summer!)

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I am so excited to share these sets with you! This is the film from our member-sponsored (thank you!!! <3 ) mountain trip last month! I really love how these came out, the locations were so beautiful.

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Go explore the videos folder, I’ve just added 9 bts videos from between shooting these sets. You can really see how beautiful these locations are. There’s a video of me collecting water from the waterfall…. I almost slipped and fell in! Haha

All members have access to this complete 22 image waterfall photoset by clicking here, the 16 image App Trail photoset by clicking here and the videos by clicking here.

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