An Open Letter on Love, Fear, and Building a Creative Life
This year has been heavy. Rights, people, and promises we thought were protected are being stripped and redefined.
Humanity feels like it’s shifting, and sometimes, it leaves us all standing on the edge of fear.
I anchor myself in moments like this: a recent City Hall wedding with C & Z. They’ve been navigating the heartbreak of trying to conceive and are now five months pregnant. On the ferry ride into Manhattan, a stranger stopped them and offered a card — part poem, part prayer — about life and birth. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t orchestrated, but it became one of the sweetest memories of their wedding day. A reminder that even in the heaviness of the world, life has a way of showing up with its own serendipity.
These are the kinds of moments that fuel me.
But running a business as a queer, DACA-mented woman of color in today’s America is different. The weight I carry is different. My goals have shifted. I’m no longer chasing travel to places I love because ICE raids are targeting your color. I’ve canceled trips. I’ve started asking myself: how small can you make your world out of fear, only to realize in the end, that you’ve helped built the walls of your own jail?
My heart fuels in storytelling, but it now carries questions of safety, sustainability, and belonging.
In an industry that is still very white-dominated, my presence is political whether I want it to be or not. There was a time I fought it back, but it’s just my reality. Even the act of marketing has become spiritual for me. Sharing my voice and expertise is more than just strategy—it’s resistance. To name my place in this industry, to speak directly to the communities I love, is to say: I exist here, and so do you.
I aim to photograph all kinds of love, because that is who I see in myself: interracial couples, queer couples, couples with skin tones that don’t always appear in wedding luxury blogs. I build with vendors who share this vision because too often, I see bubbles that don’t carry the same weight. For some, staying “apolitical” is framed as professionalism. For me, silence isn’t an option.
I’m writing this partly as a reminder to myself, and partly as an invitation: art heals. But so does community. Individualism is what got us here: this fractured, fearful moment. It’s time to sacrifice some comfort, to show up for each other in real and ordinary ways.
Like the stranger who stopped C & Z on the ferry to offer a poem, a blessing, a reminder of life and birth. It was a small act of generosity, but it became a thread in the fabric of their wedding day. That’s the kind of presence we can all practice: noticing, extending, giving.
We can acknowledge the brokenness, yes. But we can also remember that there is still sweetness to notice, and still people to fight for.
That’s what keeps me here. Grounded, grateful, and still hopeful.
