change.

“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional .” - John C. Maxwell

Last month, I graduated college. To commemorate the occasion, I convinced my boyfriend (a fellow 2024 graduate) to take a few graduation photos with me - this was a great accomplishment in its own right given that the man would prefer to do anything else than pose for a picture. My little sister offered to take the pictures with my camera, which relieved the massive burden of me lugging around my tripod bag the entire shoot, a plight faced by many photographers when their shoot subjects include themselves.

It was an early May evening, and it was cloudy - the only cloudy day that week, of course. Mississippi weather always involves a high humidity percentage, but that evening, the humid haze was especially thick and coated everything that was dumb enough to be outside in a hot, sticky overlay. It was the type of humidity that you could smell. It created a lovely layer of frizz on my hair, melted my makeup, and - most unfortunately - fogged up the camera lens. This was something my sister didn’t seem to notice as she snapped each photo, evidenced by the slightly hazy appearance of some of the pictures from the shoot. I actually ended up liking the effect, though, and leaned into it as I edited these pictures. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I thought the change was good.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about change. There are certain milestones that can define a person’s life, and I believe one of those milestones is graduating college. For the past four years, I’ve lived in the comfort of routine - I knew I was going to school on the weekdays; I knew I had a place to stay in Oxford; I knew I could rest on Thanksgiving, winter, spring, and summer breaks; and I knew that, despite many details that varied throughout the weeks, there were some details that would always remain the same. It’s so easy to become attached to the constants in your life, and it’s even easier to allow yourself to become reliant on the unchanging nature of those constants.

Change is as terrifying as it is inevitable. According to many songs, books, and movies about lost loves and past lives, nothing stays the same, and nothing lasts forever. A large part of the human experience is facing change, so why is it so scary if we know it’s coming?

I don’t think people fear the actual act of change as much as they fear the unknownness that accompanies change. Personally, I am excited about the next phase of my life, but I have absolutely no idea what that next phase will look like yet, and that’s what scares me.

Taking life day by day helps. Appreciating the daily mundane experiences, like going to the grocery store or cleaning my room, helps me to realize that, even though my old routine is a thing of the past, there are some activities that I’ll probably always do for the rest of my life, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. It makes me realize, similar to the graduation photo situation from above, that change is often good. I hope that I - and all the other new grads out there - can look back on this season of uncertainty knowing that we grew into a new version of ourselves, a version that embraces change and truly understands that change can lead to amazing things.

All images in this post shot with Canon Rebel T6 and edited with Adobe Photoshop Express