What the pandemic took away, what the silence gave back, and the one mistake I’m trying not to repeat
I want to talk to the people in the middle.
Not the ones who have it figured out. Not the ones with the clean reinvention story… the before and after, the pivot that worked, the second act already in full swing. I want to talk to the ones who are still in the quiet part. The part nobody writes about. The part where you’re not sure yet.
I know that place. I’ve been living in it for a while now. And I think there are more of us here than the highlight reels suggest.
When The Rug Came Out
About six years ago, the world stopped.
I had spent decades building an event lighting business from the ground up. Stages, productions, corporate events, live shows… I was good at it, I was busy, and by most measures I was at the peak of what that career could be. The phone rang constantly. The crew was booked. The invoices went out and the checks came back. And then, in a matter of weeks, all of it stopped.
Events don’t happen when people can’t gather. That’s the whole product; the gathering. And when the pandemic shut that down, there was nothing to fall back on. No remote version of what I did. No pivot to digital. Just silence where a very loud career used to be.
I remember standing in my warehouse looking at cases of gear that weren’t going anywhere and thinking: I built all of this, and it turns out it was a house of cards. One strong wind and it’s gone.
That was a hard thing to sit with. And also, eventually, one of the most clarifying things that ever happened to me.
What The Silence Taught Me
When the noise stopped, I had to figure out what I actually wanted. Not what I was good at. Not what the market wanted from me. Not what the next client needed. What I actually wanted to spend the next chapter of my life doing.
That question… when you finally have enough quiet to actually hear it… is a completely different question than it looks like from the outside. It’s not exciting at first. It’s disorienting. You’ve been moving at full speed for so long that stillness feels wrong. Like something must be broken. Nothing was broken. I just finally had time to think.
I started driving. I pointed a camera at things. I paid attention to light in a completely different way than I ever had in a studio. And slowly, over months and then years, a different picture started forming… one that looked nothing like what I’d left behind, and felt more like me than anything I’d built before.
The Warning I’m Carrying
Here’s the thing I want to say carefully, because I think it matters.
Looking back now, I can see that the years when my lighting business was at its financial peak were also some of the hardest years of my personal life. The work consumed everything. Relationships suffered. The pace I was running at was unsustainable in ways I wasn’t willing to admit at the time.
I don’t want to rebuild that. Not even a version of it with a better title.
The irony of building something new… a website, a content platform, a presence around photography and storytelling… is that it can very easily become the same frantic thing if you let it. The calendar fills up. The to-do list grows. The metrics start to matter. And before you know it you’re back in the warehouse, just with a different kind of gear case.
I catch myself moving too fast sometimes. I notice it now in a way I didn’t used to. And I stop. Deliberately. On purpose. Because the pace is the whole point, not just a feature of the work, but the work itself.
If You’re In The Middle
If you’re reading this and you recognize that place, the silence after something ended, the uncertainty of what comes next, the strange mix of relief and loss that a major transition brings… I want you to know something. The middle part is not a problem to solve. It’s a process to move through.
You don’t have to know what the next chapter looks like yet. You just have to stay curious enough to keep looking. And honest enough to notice when you’re about to rebuild the same thing with a different coat of paint.
I’m not ahead of you on this. I’m walking alongside you, figuring it out in real time, writing down what I see. That’s what this category is for.
The house of cards fell. What I’m building now has different foundations.
The second act is worth building slowly. It has to last.
— Michael
