My Story...

In a post-pandemic world, things have shifted.

But let's take it back a little further, my own personal life storm began in a summer of fire and destruction that burned through more than my hometown. I became a 100% solo parent who relied heavily on my photography business to support my daughter and me. As we moved into a winter where the rain seemingly never ended my father suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. The cracks were starting to appear, but I was doing my best holding my life together with sticky tape, determination, and an outward smile.

All while I went through the process of getting a home loan, buying land, and building a home for my daughter and me to have a safe and solid place to be. A seemingly impossible on-paper thing to do. I kept jumping through the hoops until they handed me the keys and a bottle of wine.

In the year that followed as we unpacked boxes, laid lawn, and started at a new school, grief nipped at my heels, all the feelings I had made myself too busy to deal with were bubbling up.

Then the covid pandemic hit, and the world stopped. Except it didn't. Bills to be paid, home school to be run, "walking-dead-style" trips to the grocery store. And yet honestly, my soul breathed a sigh of relief because I had no choice but to slow down. My mind however ramped things up to a hundred!

Then one ordinary home school morning as we worked on math together, I got a call to tell me another light in the world had gone out, one that held a special place in my heart, and all before her 40th birthday.

The wake-up calls were knocking thick and fast at my door. We only have one life! Nothing is certain! What do you really want? And yet that little voice of survival kept whispering just get through this and it will be ok.... but on the other side was only more chaos and a growing pile of unattended grief.

As people started to return to work so did I and before my first shoot in the spring I tore the cartilage in my left knee the entire way through, without an actual injury! Simply wear and tear from the career I loved so much. An arthroscopy, tibial osteotomy, and 12 weeks later I jumped back into work.

Finally back on track, at least that's what I believed, the universe had other ideas. Four sessions in I got the world's most over-dramatic splinter. I'll save you the long version but after a 2-month full-body immune response as my body tried to reject it, many kitchen table needle and tweezer expeditions to get it, ended in another surgery with a plastic surgeon to remove it. At this point, I was really starting to understand that maybe the universe had other plans for me. I only wished it was a little clearer instead of continually pulling the rug out from under me.

Once more my mind went back to being set on recovering, resting, and getting back to work... Looking back it's laughable I still believed this was how I was meant to be moving forward, yet I persisted... Then came the news of my right knee... exactly the same as my left with the small amount of grace being I hadn't torn all the way through yet. I'm currently waiting to see the surgeon. It became the final nail in my photography career as it currently existed.

It's a lot. That honestly isn't even all of it, just a few of the main highlights for the path that got me HERE, to this point in time, this way of thinking, the choices I am making, and the direction I am heading. There has been a string of events both external and internal that have compounded over time until I found myself in a perpetual cycle of exhaustion, survival, uncertainty, grief, and loss of identity. It's not all doom and gloom I promise. But it has been one hell of a storm series to navigate and that was required to clear a path I couldn't see while I was in the middle of it all.

My remedy?

Return. the art of coming home to yourself.

Choose your own adventures. Prioritise what really matters according to you. Remember and Reconnect with who you know you're meant to be. Do the things you love, try things you think you'll love. Redefine your life and yourself in ways that feel good and right for you. Because things around us change fast. Because we don't know if today will be our last day here on Earth.

I don't know about you but I am ready to come home to myself and be the person I am meant to be.

Return is going to be a ride! I have a map, and I'm happy to hold your hand while you figure out what path you want to take. We will all end up in different destinations that's the whole point, but the journey will bond us, through the courage and vulnerability it will require of us along the way.

But if you are finding yourself repeating "this can't be happening", "what the actual f*$!", "how did I get here?", "what am I even doing", "I don't have enough time"...

Then Return is a spacious, creative, self-directed community where the only goal is to feel more at home in your own life.

Come play, explore, rest.

Come home to yourself.

Come share that amazing version of you with us.

I can't wait to meet them!

🖤 Emma x