It is difficult...

To imagine living anywhere else. It feels like it was just yesterday when my middle school social studies teacher would mock Trump for his outrageous "wall" idea. 

I've grown up since then. It is hard to imagine that was over a decade ago, I've graduated college and all. Before Covid, before George Floyd's murder, before Charlie Kirk's death, before Trump took a bullet to the ear, before the broadcasted genocide of Palestine, before ICE, before the insurrection, before the war in Iran, before Epstein... I was just a kid from the suburbs of Chicago who loved picking grass and daydreaming about traveling the world.

It seemed so simple. It is hard to imagine being in 8th grade again. However, I have found some respite of my childlike wonder through photographing the country, and I do not desire to photograph anywhere else at the moment. I have discovered photographing this monumental subject of post-covid America has given me the ability to intertwine my diaristic photographic practice with the state of affairs. This allows me to process the beautiful America I remembered as a child, to the one we are living in now.