So ... Now What?

Reflections as I peer into the great unknown

Hi everyone.

It has been a minute since I last wrote here. And by minute, I mean approximately 100 days. But I’m back!

I’m writing at the kitchen table of a charming little short-term rental in Domodossola, a small city in northern Italy, not far from the Swiss border. While only at an elevation of roughly 270 meters (900 feet), the city is surrounded by mountains, which is why I chose it. The building I’m staying in was built in 1600, which makes it…not the oldest structure here.

I’m here for a solo “mini retreat” because the last few months have been very intense and I needed to get away to try to clear my head and reassess my life as I enter a new and unknown chapter.

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A Summer to Remember

Last Thursday, I completed the year-long Master in Photography program at Raffles Milano Istituto Moda e Design. The guidance we were given back in early June for our final thesis projects was that we could basically do whatever we wanted, but it had to be deeply personal. So over the summer, I conceived and birthed a mini-memoir called Born Again. In the book, I undertake an unflinching exploration of how I was impacted on a mental, emotional, and physical level by my fundamentalist religious upbringing. I look at how I’ve been haunted all my life by fear, shame, and guilt, and I attempt to make peace with messy memories and traumatic teachings from my childhood and show compassion to my younger self. I also underscore my desire to finally leave those parts of my life behind and experience a new start.

The book’s cover

I pair my writing with photographs from my childhood, as well as Bible verses and old journal excerpts, to reflect on and help make sense of who I was. Also included are striking images from a deeply personal n*de photo shoot with the fearless Sohan Sam, in which I relive the condemnation of my past before washing myself clean.

A glimpse of one of the powerful images by Sohan Sam

I worked very, very hard on this project, and while there are things I would do differently in hindsight, I’m very proud of the end result.

My goal with the creation of Born Again was for the process itself to be an experience of rebirth for me. I didn’t just want this to be a project that was symbolically about healing and new beginnings; I wanted the crafting of the project to literally help to heal and renew me. And I believe it succeeded.

A Magical and Powerful Experience

I gave my thesis presentation a week ago today. I was well rehearsed and had a tightly crafted 21-minute story ready to show and tell. In my practice runs, there was one paragraph where I occasionally found myself choking up, but I figured I would be able to power through that section. But things didn’t go exactly as planned. Instead, I found my voice cracking within the first minute or two of speaking. Not from nerves, but from sheer raw emotion. I was laying bare the blunt-force emotional traumas of my life for all to see, and I found the experience of sharing them to be rougher than I’d anticipated. I removed my glasses so I could more easily wipe my eyes, and I stopped several times while regaining my composure and steadying my voice. But as I stumbled on, I realized that my desire was coming true: Born Again was healing me, right up to the end.

The address was one of the most intense and cathartic experiences of my life, both invigorating and exhausting. By the time I finished the presentation, nearly everyone in the room was crying, including two of the three judges on the evaluation panel. I was aware as it was happening that it was having quite an effect on the audience, but it also felt surreal that it was me at the center of it all. I’m not really sure how to even talk about it much more than that. It was just a magical and powerful thing for me to experience. While this was certainly not how I’d imagined the day going, it was in the end exactly what I needed.

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So…What Now?

School is officially over, and at 51, I’m the proud new holder of a Master in Photography. But where do I go from here? I came to the mountains to try to begin to find an answer to that question.

Taken on my hike earlier today

One of the things I’m wrestling with is what exactly to do with Born Again. Part of me can’t imagine publishing it more widely, because it’s so intimate, but the other part of me can’t imagine not publishing it more widely, in some fashion or form, because it is so significant to me as a person and a writer.

I tackle some really difficult subject matter in the book, and though it is extremely personal, I believe it is also accessible and relevant to a wider audience. I’ve received some powerful and affirming feedback from the handful of trusted people who’ve read it, and quite a few people who haven’t yet read it have told me they want to buy it, which is very encouraging(!) and not something I take lightly.

On the other hand, while I’m really pleased with the final work, it is still a school project: I had less than three months to develop the idea, execute the photo shoot, and write and design the book—and I had to absorb all the costs myself. At just under a hundred pages, it packs a powerful punch, but I think it could become something more with the investment of additional time and resources, should that be possible. It’s a lot to think about; I guess we’ll see how things unfold.

In the meantime, I’m grappling with Big Life Questions like:

Who am I, really—both as a person and an artist? What are my core values, desires, and priorities? What do I want to invest my time and attention in as I walk further into my 50s? And is it possible to live and work in alignment with those interests and still pay the bills?

It’s all certainly more than I can figure out on this mini retreat. But my time here will hopefully give me a basic framework to work with in the weeks and months to come. (If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please don’t hold back from sharing them! Some of the most pivotal decisions of my life came out of insightful comments others made to me.)

One thing that I am committed to is writing here on Substack. I’m incredibly grateful to have this community of readers—which includes many of my family and friends, but also a good number of newer folks I’ve never met and perhaps never will.

One other thing I am committed to is learning Italian. I find languages to be challenging and intimidating, but I’m also a believer that if I’m going to live in this country long-term, I need to speak their language. So it’s off to scuola di lingue intensiva I go.

Thank you for being here. I plan to write again soon—or at least before another hundred days have gone by.

Michael