Why Me, Why Now?
I woke up somewhere around 2am, excruciating pain in my abdomen…
For fuck sake, appendicitis to start off a cold Monday morning in January?!?! Not how I was thinking the early part of 2013 was going to unfold. So, painfully I got dressed and my wife rushed me to the hospital; we were both scared as hell, as these things can be deadly. The nurse noticed straight away that I needed help and got me back for blood work without hesitation. The numbers came back bad. It was my lipase — the chemical your pancreas excretes to break down fat… and alcohol… before reaching your liver. My numbers were nearly unheard of. Off to the ICU I went, and for the next 5 days I got to contemplate the previous 8 years of poorly thought-out choices and the slow suicide of liquor worship.
Fast forward to 2025. Well, it’s 2026 to be fair, but I’m reflecting to a moment while writing my book, sitting in my window seat in my Charleston rental watching the rain. I realized then how dramatically far I’ve come. Life began again for me on January 21st, 2013 — the day I said ‘never again.’ A lot has changed since then. Good. Bad. Otherwise. I mended my marriage, only for us to decide a bit later to travel our own paths. There were relationships of lessons that followed. I’ve cried a ton—the snot-bubble, ugly kind of cried. I’ve laughed. I’ve lived. It was messy as fuck at times, and honestly, I’m glad it was. Because it was real. It was not some made-up fairytale bullshit of a life. Listen, I lived a ton before 2013 too, enough to know how much better it is on the path I walk today… regardless if I still hit hurdles.
And, from 2013 until now, I’ve had a camera in my hand for much of it. If not in my hand, I was teaching or talking about photography. It was the thing that gave me purpose after I put the bottle down. I spent 20 years in Denver — the place that always felt more like home than anywhere I’d ever lived — building a career in photography and graphic design, walking around with a lens between me and the world. That camera became something I didn’t expect: a teacher. Not about light and composition, but about me. About how I moved through the world. About what I was truly looking at when I thought I was just taking pictures.
The real shift though? It’s what you’re reading right now. I’ve learned that I have something to share — hard-earned, lived-in shit that other people can actually use. Not theories. Not a certification on a wall. Just twelve years of paying attention. Twelve years of aiming to be a better human being every damn day.
It hit me hard one day during a phone call with my dear friend out west — JJ, this one’s for you. He teaches photography too, way more than me actually, and we have this thing where life-meaning always finds its way into our photo-teaching conversations. When I got off the phone that day, something in my brain busted wide open. I realized that when you explain shutter speed to someone — the way a fast shutter freezes a moment, and a slow one lets motion blur beautifully through the frame — you’re not just talking about cameras anymore. You’re handing someone a language for the way anxiety freezes you in place, or the way grief moves through you whether you fight it or not. People who have never touched a camera suddenly have a word for something they’ve been feeling for years and couldn’t name.
That was the moment I knew what I was supposed to be doing.
I’m not a therapist. I’m not a life coach with a certification on my wall. I’m a dude that disliked where he grew up in Marietta, Georgia, almost drank himself to death in Denver, Colorado, and picked up a camera when he put down the bottle. I spent the next twelve years figuring life out — slowly, messily, and with plenty of backsliding. I learned what it feels like to see my life clearly. I’ve got 27 photography concepts that I’ve turned into tools for navigating the hard stuff. Not because I sat down and invented a system. Rather, because the camera kept teaching me, the Universe kept guiding me, and I kept paying attention. Simple as that.
The platform you’re on right now — this site, these articles, and a book that’s already written and in the next phase — isn’t built around photography. It’s built around YOU. Around the idea that you already have everything you need to move through whatever blur you’re in. I just happen to speak a language that makes that easier to hear.
So why me? Because I’ve been in the ICU at 2am wondering if I’d see morning, and I’ve been in a window seat in downtown Charleston watching the rain, completely at peace — sober, grateful, still figuring it out. Yes… still figuring it out, same as you. I know both of those places and a lot of what lives between them. I’m not preaching from some enlightened mountain top; I’m walking with you having learned a thing or two is all.
Why now? Because frankly — I’m fucking done waiting for permission to share what I know.
If you’re in the middle of the mess right now, you’re in the right place. Pull up a chair.
Cheers,
Your Pal, Kev