One Year in Colorado: How I Got My Camera Back
July 5th, 2025. That was the day I drove into Colorado for the first time since 2011 — when a 22-year-old version of me passed through on her way to a whole different life. Engaged to a West Point graduate (married legally that year), two deployments, two kids, and more moving boxes than I care to count later, I was driving to a town I had never been to, to a house I’ve never seen, to a life I didn’t have any expectations for.
Getting here wasn't just a PCS (Permanent Change of Station) move. It was the end of seven years at West Point, where I built a photography business working with cadet, photographed my first weddings, survived New York during COVID, and somewhere along the way quietly lost the thread of who I was as a creative. I didn't notice it happening. That's the thing about losing your creative identity — it doesn't announce itself. It just slowly turns the volume down until one day you realize you haven't heard the music in a while, or wonder where the music is coming from.
We spent seven wonderful years at West Point, raising our kids, starting my business, building a life inside the kind of community that only military families really understand. I mainly photographed cadets in their senior graduation uniforms — a good niche, a fun niche, and one I genuinely loved. I started photographing weddings in 2019 and had some really great ones that I can't wait to finally talk about. But the repetition, the sameness of the work, the craving for creativity I kept pushing down — it added up. And then COVID added a few more bricks to the pile.
So after a year of being in Colorado, it's time to talk about why I didn't pursue weddings or photography for an entire year. Short and sweet: I WAS STUCK. Working at West Point, I basically did the same shoot over and over again, craving creativity for years but honestly kind of scared about it. Rejection sensitivity is real — and if you have ADHD, it has a clinical name: rejection sensitive dysphoria, and it is not a character flaw, it is a neurological reality. Boy did it have its grip on me.
Creatives I ran into randomly in Colorado — at school registration and our local pool, because apparently that's where I do my networking — told me similar things: the market here is saturated. That instantly turned me off. I hit a burnout phase where I questioned everything. Do I want to be a photographer, or do I want to shift gears into something else entirely? The roller coaster I put myself on was intense. My two best friends sat with me playing video games or talked to me every day while I was grocery shopping, keeping me tethered to something real while I figured out what I actually wanted. Slowly, after eight months, I started to feel the veil lift. My husband and kids were my constant support line, as each day ticked by and I slowly clawed my way out.
Things that helped: talking to my doctor and getting support on the mental health front. Walking every day. Talking to my friends every day — to actually process things now that I had the time and space to sort through them instead of just surviving. Playing Stardew Valley. Yes, really. It's a farming simulation game that is objectively adorable and it genuinely helped me with organization and my ADHD. The dopamine hits from small, completed tasks are real and science-backed, and I will advocate for this game any day.
But the thing that actually finished the job — the thing that reached into whatever drawer I'd shoved my brain into and pulled it back out — was completely accidental and deeply unglamorous: a library card.
Somewhere along the way we went to the Louisville Public Library and I got my first library card. They had an online catalog where I could order books and have them sent to the community center near my house. I got so many books. I think I'm up to 80 read or combed through in the past two months alone. Learning anything I can, no matter the subject. Business, leadership, history, science, photography, women's suffrage — whatever looked interesting. It's been freeing in a way I didn't expect. Turns out my brain wasn't broken. It was just starving. I even took a flower arranging class near Denver because I needed to LEARN SOMETHING.
The final nail in the burnout coffin came from a fellow military spouse down in the Colorado Springs area who said something so simple it set fire to the ember that was slowing burning: "We are supposed to enjoy what we are doing." For whatever reason that hit me like a ton of bricks. A wave of relief poured over me. I usually get nervous before weddings or even a family session — it was becoming debilitating, until Chantel reminded me of the joy and my why. Sometimes you need someone outside your own head to say the thing out loud.
So here we are. One year in Colorado. One year of figuring out what the next version of this looks like.
I turn 40 in five months. I am a wedding and senior portrait photographer based in Boulder, Colorado, and for the first time in my career I am building something that actually looks like me. I photograph weddings and elopements across the Front Range and Colorado mountain corridor — for couples who want a photographer who's present, not invisible, who blends documentary instinct with real posing guidance, who will be in it with them when it counts. I also travel to West Point twice a year for Firstie portraits, because some things you don't leave behind when you move.
If you've read this far, thank you. Genuinely. Colorado gave me my camera back. I'm just getting started with what I do with it. If you're planning a wedding, elopement, or senior session in Colorado — or you're a West Point family looking for Firstie portraits — I'd love to hear about your day.
