Divya is hilarious to work with. The photos don’t show it, but she is a dork. She’s also incredibly intelligent, sexy, and funny. She was in the neighborhood and asked me for an impromptu shoot. She brought the talented MUA Cabrielle Brooks and hair stylist Kia Floss. We only had enough time to do a couple of looks, but that didn’t stop us. The last time we shot we only had a couple of hours and managed to pull off 3 looks that ended up looking pretty fucking cool.

See? I can shoot people with their clothes on.

She arrived and we shot a couple of outfits before our time was up. I had an interesting idea I wanted to try out and Divya was more than excited to try out something most people would consider a prelude to kidnapping. She took it in stride and even managed to keep her cool as I restrained her arms to her body.

It took me a few months of mulling it over to settle on an idea for the last shot. The first few attempts didn’t go right and I abandoned the piece until I came back to it this morning. Just like Lucid Manifestation, this image means a lot to me in a surprising way. Since late last year I’ve been slowly coming to terms with a condition that I have called Depersonalization Disorder (DPD). What is odd, is that DPD is a recognized condition but no medications have been developed for it, and no treatment recommendations have been established. In fact, so few people actually know about DPD that when a person actually enters an intense depersonalized state for the first time they often believe they are the only ones who possess the condition.

Its terrifying for some. And life shaping for others.

So during this time I’ve been in a state of reflection about my entire life. As a result, my priorities have been weighed, examined and reshuffled. It wasn’t until this morning that I realized why. This is my second attempt at trying rebalance it.

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