Why Me, Why Now?
I woke up somewhere around 2am, excruciating pain in my abdomen…
For fuck’s sake, appendicitis to start off a cold Monday morning in January?! Not exactly how I imagined the early part of 2013 unfolding. So, painfully, I got dressed and my wife rushed me to the hospital. We were both scared as hell, because these things can be deadly. The nurse noticed straight away I needed help, and got me back for blood work without hesitation.
The numbers came back. They were bad.
It was my lipase, the enzyme your pancreas releases to break down fat… and one of the first things to spike when alcohol starts doing damage. My numbers were nearly unheard of.
Off to the ICU I went, and for the next five days I contemplated the previous eight years of poorly thought-out choices and the slow suicide of whiskey worship.
Fast forward to 2025. Well, it’s 2026 to be fair, but I’m reflecting on a moment while writing my book, sitting in a window seat in my Charleston rental watching the rain. I love the rain. It was then I truly realized 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 that followed, and plenty of lessons in each. 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. I built a career in photography and graphic design there, 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. We have this thing when we’re talking, where life-meaning always finds its way into our photo-teaching conversations. It’s pretty great to be honest. Anyway, 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 who didn’t love where he grew up in Marietta, Georgia, almost drank himself to death in Denver, Colorado, and picked up a camera when he put the bottle down. 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 written and awaiting 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 mountaintop; I’m just walking with you, having learned a thing or two along the way, and holding the light for both of us.
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