these emotions bouncing all over my brain to go away and just to let things happen.
to not feel entitled to anything, ever. To be perfectly happy living off the land somewhere sans luxury of any kind.
to spend my life showing people that they are loved and valuable.
to go back in time and repeat a certain something that may or may not happen again.
to LET GO of myself and just be. (I want this SO freaking much.)
to see and feel and document beauty.
to do what I really want to do without being so apprehensive about it.
Let go, let go, let go.
with love and an overactive brain that may or may not explode,
Megan
added to the list:
to be a sort of 'renaissance woman'
to not let making music slip away from me again
Yesterday I had the privilege of doing engagement pictures for Sarah Lane and Sean Carroll. What a wonderful couple! They were so easy to photograph, and they just exude love for each other.
I have got to learn how to format photos for the web, because they are so washed out when I post on here! Agh! I swear they're more vibrant in real life.
Oh well. Off to photograph my *photo story that I finally got*! Hallelujah!
With love and soreness,
Megan
fin.
I couldn't sleep last night. For about an hour I lay in the dark, worrying. It is very possible that I will not graduate in May. I have been trying for two months now to get a substantial story going for my documentary class, but I have hit brick wall after brick wall. Our next deadline is Wednesday, where we will play what we have so far to the class. I have no substantial story. And if I don't get one quick, I won't pass, and I won't graduate.
This consumed my thoughts and dreams last night, and I woke with an incredibly heavy weight on my heart. I got together a list of things to do. I'm going to a family shelter in Durham Monday night and speaking to the families that show up, and hopefully (hopefully, as in, with all my heart I want and need this to happen) one of the parents will come up and talk to me afterward and let me photograph their family this week and do a documentary story on them. Other options include trying to find a family at Eastway (again), trying to jump through all the hoops involving hunger, and go to another shelter and just try to find an individual to do a story on.
I listened to a sermon this morning about belief. The word "believe" has been impossible to miss at The Summit for the past couple of months, because it's the theme for the church's mission expansion project. I don't think there's any other word that needs to be echoed to me over and over. It is what needs to reverberate in my mind until I go insane, because I do not live in belief as I should. It is so freeing to take God at His word, believe that He is who He says He is.
I realized I need to believe now more than ever. Believe that, whether I graduate this semester or not, I will be ok. Believe that my God is bigger than these circumstances and dead ends, and it is His grace that's gotten me so far. His grace is all that I need. I have got to let this sink in, and rest and be FREED by this reality.
I am stressed out again. How freaking cyclical am I? I just need to read that last paragraph over and over until it gets into my stupid brain.
with love and stressssss that will hopefully go away,
Megan
I feel like I just need to turn my brain off for a day. If you filled a bucket with those little word magnets and then dumped them all out on the floor... that is what my brain looks like right now.
On the way home, I just talked to God. Out loud. I'm a verbal processor, I think, but I don't want to process to people most of the time because it first comes out as total nonsense. It was really healthy just to be candid (because, seriously, God knows what's in my head anyway). The things coming out of my mouth lately are less and less proper. I'm shaking off a lot of the Christian jargon that I grew up with, and just talking. Speaking the words that are bouncing around my brain and just getting them out and trying to make sense of them.
I'm in the middle of a rebellious streak. I don't want to feel like I have something to prove, to myself or to anybody. But I do right now. I'm not sure why. I feel like just defying everything. That's so atypical for me. I feel like such a mess, and I don't feel quite like myself. But it will pass, and I can make it.
This probably makes no sense, but this is me processing, so there.
Lilies are making my room smell fabulous, and I'm about to drift off into a very sound sleep. Three hours is not enough, I have learned.
With love and exhaustion (in every sense),
Megan
*I want my marriage to resemble
this. At least I just think it's adorable and beautiful and earthy and lovely.
Today was the Monday-est Monday I've had in a while.
1. Didn't give myself enough time to get ready in the a.m. Also didn't get enough sleep, and I'm crampy and fighting off the remnants of a cold.
2. Went to pick up a friend at the airport. Flight was delayed nearly 2 hours.
3. Had to leave the airport before my friend arrived, because I was supposed to give a presentation at noon. Felt really awful about it.
4. Sped to campus, went to class and learned that I was going to present Wednesday instead (bittersweet).
5. Didn't bring an umbrella to class, so I got pretty soaked on the way back to my car.
6. After a workout class later in the day, the rain finally really defeated me. We're talking, face down on the mat, down for the count. It's over. No umbrella again, and I just gave up running and walked the 10 minutes to my car, getting drenched. It actually was kind of nice. Therapeutic, maybe. But still.
What a Monday.
Now I have to write a paper.
With love and tea and a piece of nutella toast (mmm),
Megan
is a night of nail-painting, closet-cleaning, new-music-listening, photo uploading, scrubbing the I-got-three-hours-of-sleep-and-slept-on-airport-seats-during-the-layover off of me.
This weekend of glorious not much of anything is the perfect way to end spring break (my last, can you believe it?)
Graduation is in two months. Two months. The thought makes tears well up in my eyes because, just like those stupid adults said, it has gone by so fast. In a blink, really, I flew through four years of college. I went from a tiny girl who did always as she was told-- no opinions of her own-- her world so small, to a "young adult," full of insatiable wonder and ready for an adventure, making her OWN decisions (finally) and learning how to do things on her own.
Spring break was wonderful. It started with a lovely day at the beach/in Wilmington-- the beach was freaking cold, with Emmy Sue, and early Monday I drove with Kathryn to Charlotte to fly to Detroit to fly to Orlando to see Laura. We went to allll of the Disney parks and experienced all of the magic and fairytales possible, along with venting our big-girl frustrations and sharing our I-don't-know-what's-happening-in-May thoughts.
I-tend-to-hyphenate-everything.
But seriously, I cannot wait to have a little family (no kids under 5) to take to Disney World. It is so freaking magical, I can hardly stand it. I looveee iiiiitttt!!!!
(But, by 'cannot wait,' I mean I can totally wait severalll years. Kids, bah!)
LAST THING. I downloaded an album by Needtobreathe, and it is nice. I haven't downloaded much of any Christian music lately because it all sounds like it should be played on K-Love. *shudder* I don't know why that irritates me, but it does. So, seriously, for the past several months, I have done the "K-Love test" on all Christian albums. This album could potentially be played to white upper-middle class families, but I like it. So I bought it and will just have to get over it.
Thanks, you nice blog reader, for sticking through my ramblyness. You're the best.
Megan
I'm sitting in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport waiting on my second flight of the day. My real flight is at 9:30, but snow is going to be dumped all over the Eastern seaboard starting this evening. And the last thing I want is to be stuck in DFW airport all night.
Despite the suckiness of spending my day going from terminal to terminal, waiting and waiting, I really love being in the airport. I love being surrounded by the bustle and feeling the importance of presenting a boarding pass and getting on a plane. I carry myself differently when I travel. I think I stand up straighter and walk with an unusual "I have places to go and people to see" confidence. I. love. to. travel.
So, let me tell you about the photojournalism conference, blog reader! It was fantastic. I met lots of really great people who love the Lord and love storytelling. I met a lovely UNC alumna (one of the faculty for the conference) and people with missions organizations, which I'll get to later.
A couple of notes from the conference:
- Never let your craft outpace your humanity. Loving people will produce better stories.
- Keep moving forward. Always. Don't stop learning and experimenting.
- In an industry that's struggling, be encouraged by the fact that storytelling will never die. Single-medium stories may be fading, but new media can be really experimental and freeing. We can do so, so much when we blend photos, audio, video and words.
- That being said, some stories might be best told in one medium that can stand alone. Don't do multimedia for multimedia's sake.
- When your full-time job gets in the way of your freelancing, it's time to freelance full-time.
- Keep track of business stuff! Marketing, branding, billing, etc. This is so counterintuitive to Megan Finger.
- What we do has value. Don't give your work away.
- Find stories that celebrate life. Everything powerful doesn't have to be doom-and-gloom.
- Find your niche.
- Be a jack of all trades, and a master of one-- storytelling.
- The diptychs from this story by Scott Strazzante are some of the most amazing things I've ever seen. How crazy is it that he could find such similar images years apart from each other? And hearing the story behind it made it so much better. I think I liked seeing the diptychs by themselves better, but the mediastorm version is wonderful, too.
Now, let me tell you about an encounter that I think God orchestrated this weekend. I sat down at a random table for dinner, and one of the gentlemen at the table works with a missions organization I'm familiar with. Long story short, a writing job in Prague is on the table!
haaa!!
Oh God, you are wonderful and funny sometimes. How blessed I am that there are so many opportunities in the world! I'm so giddy!
I am going to just sit and soak in the fact that I'm in an airport again. I wish I was dressed more professionally today. Oh well.
With love and a really fantastic weekend of journalists and fellowship,
Megan
