Today is my 32nd Birthday. I've been finding it an eye opening experience, almost as if the past year was spent lifting a veil that had been hiding the world around me and not the other way around. In therapy I've been discussing this concept as something along the lines of internal alignment or centering yourself and finding balance. More to the point - is there a difference between the vision I have of and for myself in comparison to the man that I am or the man that I've become or will become? If I've learned anything in life it's that one question will always beget another and so on and so forth; It all tumbles into inter-connectedness even as this world spins madly on around you and you find yourself lost within the translation.

In these pictures I'm taking Polaroids of every page from a book I have been writing and had stuck up on my walls. For the better part of a year I've been searching to understand the bigger picture of what I am trying to say. Not just searching for the beats or how it it can flow from one part to the next, but for the deeper meaning of it all and its connection to the world around us: Are our memories ever really only for ourselves? Or are they meant for something bigger, something more dynamic? Why can't we rid ourselves of the ones we hate? Or the ones that shame us? Does every memory need a story? How can we know when the smallest moments will become the most impactful? It's been a journey through self reflection, but the world has become my mirror. Now as I keep the pages in a binder to flip through daily, I'm left with the concept of finishing the things you start or maybe even lost with the notion of not knowing where to start again.

Still, with constant reflection come reminders that I have been lost so many times in my life without direction. Lost to the tune of never finding any meaning to it all. And at the age of thirty-two, I am realizing more and more how much I have been found at every turn. That with every question I've asked, I've also been given an answer. That I've been blessed in ways I can't even describe and some I can, but wouldn't want to.

The struggle to be real and survive is as evident as ever to me, but the fight has never been what was has deterred me. It has only made me stronger. I understand now how that will always be the case. Because here I am at thirty-two; alive.