The Places That Helped Me Breathe Again.
For a long time my world felt small. Not in a bad way, just limited. The same streets, the same routines, the same familiar views. I had never travelled - at least not in the way people talk about when they discover somewhere new in the world. In fact, I went 18 years without ever leaving that bubble. And for a while, I didn’t question it.
Until COVID happened…
Like everyone else, life shifted overnight. School moved online, days blurred together and everything that once felt structured became flat. Wake up, log on to lessons, sit in the same spot for hours, log off and repeat. Everything was lived through a screen - lectures, conversations but most of all creativity.
Photography which once was a reason to travel outside, to explore and to capture then became silent. No people, no moments to capture, no reason to go outside.
I’d pick up the camera less and less. Not because I didn’t care but because I didn’t know what to do with it, inspiration felt limited just like my access to the world. The outside world started to feel unfamiliar.
Life was shrunk to four walls and a screen.
Come to 2022, covid regulations loosened and I jumped at the chance to travel. I decided to take a gap year with uncertainty around decisions for university. I had never really travelled before but the act itself of going somewhere new felt like an act of rebellion against the years of covid restrictions.
I stepped onto the plane with a camera in my bag but still lost for ambition to take images. I landed in Ireland (somewhere close to test the waters of travelling). And there it began…
Overwhelming, but everything felt so much more vivid than I had remembered. Fast paced movement, noise, light - it felt like my senses had been switched back on after being dulled for so long. And with that…
I picked up my camera.
It wasn’t forced, but I felt the need to document this out of fear if it was the last time I would witness it, fear that I would be stuck back in those four walls again.
COVID had taken a lot away from me, some things I didn’t even realise. Travel broke that, and I regained my passion for the camera. Slowly my confidence came back, and I took the jump and submitted my UCAS application to universities. From that point, I knew photography was my future.
The places I travelled didn’t just give me new photos, it gave me back the part of photography I lost during those long, quiet months.
They helped me reconnect with everything I thought I left behind.
