Look Up

Ever since I can remember, I have always been looking up. Looking up at clouds, stars, lightning, the moon, and anything else the sky had to offer. Whenever I felt lost or stuck or afraid, I would look up. To see the vastness of the sky always seemed to help make my problems seem smaller. It was a way of grounding myself. When I grew up, I started looking up at concerts, theatrical shows and any other productions I attended. I loved the feeling that seeing live events gave me so much that became a lighting designer. I have spent my entire career so entranced by complex lighting designs, video and scenic elements, and the electricity and teamwork that makes these shows possible. I have designed and programmed powerful and immersive shows that connect people and help them to feel that they are a part of something bigger than themselves. It has been a beautiful career, yet somehow I began to lose myself. I was so busy looking up while I was inside that I forgot to look up while I was outside as well.

Working in entertainment is a life sentence. It consumes your entire world with grueling hours and endless amounts of intense physical and mental labor. Slowly, everyone and everything you know becomes tied to your work and anything you once knew outside of that seems to fade away. As my career went on, the only people I ever spent any meaningful time with were my coworkers. This was not necessarily a bad thing. I am extremely fortunate to have had an incredible team to work with and I love my team members more than I could ever hope to express through words. However, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss as I began to lose touch with the outside world and the other parts of my life not associated with work. I had given up playing music for work. I had given up traveling for work. I had given up valuable time with friends and family for work. I had become so absorbed, I had no idea how to find my way out. If I wanted to look up, the only thing to see would be the rigging in the rafters above my head in an event space. I was trapped.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, thousands and thousands of entertainment workers, myself included, were laid off or furloughed from our jobs. An entire industry ground to a halt and suddenly years worth of schooling and/or experience for anyone in the industry was rendered completely useless. For many of us, this has been devastating not just financially, but emotionally. What do you do when the thing you have committed your entire life to ceases to exist? How do you move forward when the only direction you knew is no longer an option? I think all of us that have been affected by the pandemic have had to ask ourselves some difficult questions and reflect on what we want in life. I had to ask myself if I wanted to cling on to what I knew and hope that the industry would return, or if I wanted to move on. Its easy to want to fall into the safety net of an already learned skillset. To keep going with what I know instead of trying to use this opportunity to grow.

I am among some of the very lucky few who have been furloughed and able to collect enough unemployment to support myself during this time. I needed to recognize this time in my life as a gift and a great opportunity to be free of the career that had consumed my whole life. After a few weeks of wallowing in sorrow for a career put on hold by a virus, I decided I wanted to go outside. For the first time in years, uninhibited by the stressors of my work, I looked up.

I remembered how fascinated I was by the sky. I remembered my interest in weather patterns and clouds. I remembered that as a child, all I actually wanted to do was watch the weather and be a storm chaser. There are some who believe that whatever young child says they want to be when they grow up is their life’s calling. That whatever that dream is, no matter how outrageous, that is what that child is meant to become. Well, if I was to ask five year old me what it was I was supposed to be doing with my life, it would be driving across the country chasing storms. So I decided to listen to that part of myself and have spent the last few months doing exactly that. I have learned to understand radars, calculate dew points, understand how weather patterns are affected by air temperature, and a thousand other things I didn’t even realize I wanted to know. I still have so much to learn its intimidating, but I love it. For the first time in years I woke up excited every single day to see what the weather was doing and where the next chase would take me.

I began filming and photographing everything I could and something I found I have a knack for is lightning photography. I have the best results capturing lightning by actually filming a storm with my iPhone, then scrubbing through the footage frame by frame and saving the frames that have the best lightning strikes as photos. That is precisely how I got this photo, which has not been edited in any way. It was taken just outside of Orin, Wyoming during a thunderstorm in May of this year and it is the pride and joy of my lightning collection so far.

Earlier I said that working in entertainment is a life sentence, and it is. However, after my experience this summer I think I’ve decided to file an appeal. Its time to keep looking up.