Deciding to be on my own has challenged and grown me in ways I never imagined. Roll your eyes if you want; that's a cliche, but its a real one.

In 2016 I had a couple of very big losses. I had moved back to Minneapolis from Southern California having rebuilt my life and rediscovered (or perhaps discovered for the first time), who I was and what I wanted out of life. Our scene, our image, our political affiliations, what we view to be our personal values or morals, can sometimes cause us to be dishonest with ourselves about what we really want or who we really are. It was in California that I learned to dream big, God has got my back, and to ask myself: what is the worst thing that can happen to me if I admit to myself and to the world what I really want and what I'm really thinking?

My feminist, liberal ideals that constantly drilled into me that I had to be independent, and my background of having to act tough to survive, collided with the real world and I realized that like all of us, whether we admit it or not, want to feel loved and valued. I started to pray for my person to come. I said I wanted him to love God, love me, love children, be marriage-minded, be attractive and passionate and creative. That is a pretty short list but seemed lofty to me. In my mind, somebody like that didn't exist, and if they did, what would they want with someone like me?

Then I found that person.

And then, I lost them.

What was worse, I had to see him almost every day. We worked together. If you've ever known someone in addiction you've seen the sick way they navigate the world. I watched the enablers around us pretending he was not showing up high, and talking shit behind his back. I would avoid him because I didn't want to get ensnared and used, and it would take everything I had to reject his advances. You can't have me and have your addiction. Choose one. He made his choice, he had to stick to it, and so did I. It destroyed me. Not just to know it was happening but having to watch it. Seeing the good days and being hopeful, then seeing the bad days and feeling that sorrow compound. It was like breaking up over and over again, while everyone was watching, in an environment that was responsible for paying my bills, where my image was of the utmost importance and I spent all day long taking care of other people. In the midst of all of this, I was pissed at God and confused how He could answer a prayer in such a seemingly perfect way and then tear it away from me so ruthlessly, serving me daily humiliation and emotional torture having to fucking be around this person I love and ward off their affection in the name of doing the right thing. It felt like such a slap in the face.

I also hated the job. I knew that if I had cooperation of the management and staff that I could be successful. To have so much passion for what I do and be treated like what I did, didn't matter, really took a toll on me. I tried everything I could to make that job work and turned down other, better opportunities because I was loyal and I wanted to be the best. This situation felt like I was drowning. It was also a huge blow to my ego. When I had a fully-booked day and he walked by my makeup chair, I felt invincible. But when I was buzzing around looking for things to do and couldn't find anything, when I could feel my own discouragement and couldn't hide it, all the while knowing I was being watched... to put that in the plainest terms, that really crushed me.

Walking out of that building was the most freeing feeling I ever had in my life. I felt like a dog that ran away from the pound. Right away I knew that I was learning some big things. The first was that I could walk away from something even if I REALLY fucking wanted it, because something wasn't right and I was unwilling to compromise myself for that anymore. I know I want to be in love and be in a partnership but I'm not willing to do that with someone who is content to destroy themselves, even if they're really handsome, really good to me, and are otherwise everything I could ever want in another person. I know I want to be a makeup artist for the rest of my life (or until my hands fall off), but I don't want to do it for a company that doesn't value me or what I do, even if they have a big name and people are impressed.

Maybe those seem like no-brainers, but to me those were big things. Sometimes I find myself in situations wondering how I tolerated it, and realized that its because I was in it, and even though I was unhappy, I thought it was the best I could ever hope for. Its not until you lose those things that you learn things can be better. It was all in my head. There are better jobs, there are better partners. I had spent years having a very low self-opinion and thinking I was fortunate to get a shitty deal because it promised me something I wanted. Unlearning that comes with age and experience. I was standing in my own way and not doing what I knew I wanted to do, because I thought I couldn't do it, I was playing it safe, and I was depending on someone or something else to meet a need that I could meet myself.

So I ventured out on my own. I qualify this my saying I am not self-made. I work for myself but I also freelance for quite a few other people and businesses. But, I have total autonomy under them. Its personally empowering to be able to say no without fear, and its professionally empowering for the people I work for to know that when I am there representing them, I am wholly and fully present because I want to be there and I believe in what they are doing. I do makeup the same way that I always have, but the circumstances are right, so its lifting me up instead of pounding me into the ground. It's all in my head.

Through all of this I learned a lot about why I do what I do. I can tell you the history of my life or what got me into makeup artistry. I can feed you a line about how I have a passion for making peoples' day or that makeup is like painting on a pre-formed canvas. All of those things are true and I've spoken them or written them many times. But the reality is that I do what I do because I am searching for something.

When I was partnered with an ex of mine years back, we did makeup and photography for models and boudoir sessions. When I left him, I left that industry. I worked for a makeup counter. Women started coming in and asking if I did on-site makeup for weddings and I said that I would. I was making more money doing that than anything else I ever did, it felt safe, it was joyful, and I noticed that a part of me felt very fulfilled being part of their family and friend circle for a day. It was restorative for me to see that a man wanted to commit to a woman and share his life with her, and declare that in front of God and everyone else. This had by proxy fulfilled a need that I didn't realize was even there, and was perpetually displaying to me that my desire for human connection was not weak or shameful, it was ceremonious and cause to celebrate.

Eventually I began to heal and re-enter the industry I used to be a part of, but on a selective basis. That morphed into serving clients for boudoir photoshoots. Boudoir is another one of those things that is entirely in your head. I love being part of an all-female crew of photographers, hair stylists and myself, creating a safe space for a woman to embrace her sensuality and feel encouragement and sisterhood from those of us who were helping to create fantasy images of herself. But I am always asking myself why. Why do some things like the salon, where someone should seem relatively happy, make me feel like shit? And why do things like boudoir photography, make me feel like I can conquer the world? There's no question in anybody's mind that its a fun job, but what is it about it that seems to give me so much life?

I discovered the answer when I did my own recent boudoir session. When I did my session we had already had three clients- an agency model doing her first photo shoot without her prosthetic leg, a single mom of 3 who wanted photos for her boyfriend, and our plus-size photographer who had her partner do a shoot with her in the hotel. Everyone felt great during their sessions and you could tell. Then the photographer started shooting me. I was an insecure, uncomfortable shrinking violet. After 15 minutes of shooting I told the photographer to stop, I did not want to do this. It did not feel good.

I went into the bathroom and took all my clothes off. I looked in the mirror. I asked why I thought the woman staring back at me was beautiful but the woman I saw when the photographer showed me the back of the camera looked so awful to me. I asked why women would pay us to take photos like this of them, concluding that I was glad I hadn't paid for this myself. I asked why they all felt so good when they left and I felt so bad. Then I looked down and saw that the clothes I had taken off were all things that covered up parts of me that I didn't like. A padded bra to cover up that I had a flat chest, a high-waisted pencil skirt to cover the stomach I don't like, stockings to cover the thighs I wish looked differently. In the mirror I was naked and wasn't hiding anything. I had been told over and over that what I was or what I looked like, was wrong and needed to be hidden or fixed or apologized for in order to be acceptable to other people. So I filled up the bathtub, the photographer shot me in there totally naked, and those were the shots I was proud of. I LOVE these pictures. One of them is my profile picture on Steemit.

That naked broad was someone I could go to bed with, and I wanted nothing to do with the fearful person I had seen earlier. It was the same hotel room, I was the same person, it was the same photographer. But my head was in a different place.

Because of where my head was, in all of these circumstances, everything was better. My morale is better, my art is better, my work is better, I am better.

I have the desire to be told that I am the love of someone's life, but instead of a guy telling me that, I tell myself. I want to be told I am beautiful and sexy and desirable, but instead of waiting for someone to tell me that, I tell and show other women and in turn I assure myself that if I had a client like me there is no way I would ever think badly of any part of her. I want success and financial security, but instead of breaking myself for a company in exchange for a steady paycheck, I am riding the highs and lows of being a business owner (which believe me right now, feels like a fucking valley). I want stability, but instead of finding it in safe, calculated ways, I am doing it by putting myself first and understanding that without my head in the right place, absolutely NOTHING works. If you're having a panic attack every day because of a relationship that's killing you, or you're coming into work 15 minutes late all the time because you hate it and you don't care, or you're abusing your body with food/drugs/hookups/whatever because you hate yourself or want an escape from reality or feelings, you are not in control of your world. The world controls you. I'm learning very quickly that your motions can be the same but your environment, motives and mindset are the things that determine if those motions nurture you or destroy you. I learned this from losing the things I thought were my only hope, or my last hope, or my safety net, or the best I could ever do.