Life throws us lemons, the lemonade might not come out easy.

It all started when I was 13, when my daddy bought my mom her new Nokia Asa 200, it was the iPhone of 2012. It wasn’t until one evening I took a picture of the flowers we grew in front of our balcony with her phone and the picture came out amazingly well. All shades of colors in one photo, “magic”, I thought to myself.

Twelve years later, a dead dad, and an aging mother, many memory cards later, and a Sony Digital SLR I saved up and bought for myself after graduating university. Launching myself into the freelancing world with the sole mission of being a profitable photographer after spending four years studying International Relations, which I hated by the way.

I always loved taking pictures of people unaware, as I felt that it captured their true emotions. So I opted to find gigs where people wanted portraits taken of them, weddings, and even children birthday parties. It was hard trying to earn from freelancing, all while desperately trying to take care of my mom.

“put your self out there” they said, so I posted every picture I have ever taken, my friends from uni and my mom, she’s tired of seeing the front of my camera at this point.

But it’s seemed pointless, no gigs, no social media following, I felt like a ghost and was this close to wrapping it up, picking up my degree and starting to figure out what International Relations even is, until–

AbstractSunday, a renowned artist liked an Instagram photo of my mom and commented “beautiful! did she even know you did this?!”, I replied and explained my whole love of taking unaware photos and he replied AGAIN “that’s amazing! your photos are beautiful”.

This got me thinking of how lucky I was, and why I cannot stop! If AbstractSunday loves what I do, imagine who else is out there?

I have always wanted luck to shine on me, but the lucky ones are the ones that kept showing up. AbstractSunday wouldn’t have liked my Instagram post, if there was no Instagram post.