Romanticizing my life

Liz Morrow

July 12, 2023

I was watering the garden last night and the light was lighting, so I ran inside and grabbed my DSLR because for whatever reason phones are just trash at capturing the milky warm glow of evening. With content creation shifting to prioritize short form video, I so rarely capture life in still images these days. There’s a frenetic energy surrounding short form video creation. Clips are short to keep our short attention spans engaged, and even the audio is sometimes sped up so make sure everything fits into a minute long video. It’s left me feeling pretty exhausted and I’ve been wanting to embrace a slower pace of things this summer.

As I took these photos I realized I very rarely slow down to take photos any more. During my fashion blogging days, I was in the habit of taking photos nearly every day of my outfit. I was constantly thinking of beautiful locations to shoot in, taking photos of snippits of life, and each blog post was filled with written reflections. Now the writing I do is voiceover scripts for Reels, and short Instagram captions. Anyone who has been blogging since before 2010 has lamented the loss of long-form static media, and I’ve certainly made my complaints over the years as we’ve become beholden to algorithms to show our content to our audiences.

But this summer I’m disengaging. For my mental health and my creativity. I don’t believe artists (or humans in general) are designed to create at such a pace, and with algorithms and insights top of mind at all times. As I took these photos I felt like I was romanticizing my own life and TBH, I think I’m going to spend the rest of summer doing just that.

I feel like a bit of a remodel witch, spinning twine into gold with this house. Reno-Alchemy. Sometimes you can feel a little crazy when you can see something that doesn’t exist yet, but there’s nothing like the feeling of that vision finally existing in real life. I think stuff like this is why I have no interest in building a new house from scratch. The transformation dopamine is just too addicting.