Part Two (and Three)
July 3, 2026
My son is about to turn six.
Covid hit when I was 24 weeks pregnant — just barely on the viable side of everything I had fought for — and after a short period of working from home, I went back to bedside at 34 weeks and worked nights until I delivered.
There was no soft landing. He arrived into a world that was already on fire and I went back into that fire as a new mother, postpartum, trying to hold onto a breastfeeding relationship I had fought so hard for, responding to emergency after emergency in inadequate PPE, the guidance changing week to week, the fear constant.
And I would feel my milk supply dropping and there was nothing I could do about it. I had triple fed my entire maternity leave which was it’s own special flavor of hell (what is that, you may ask? You breastfeed your baby (for 15-30 minutes at least), then pump (for 15 minutes), then feed them what you pump by bottle (another 20 minutes), then clean the pump parts and bottles, every two hours…for three months straight). We were all so stretched so thin. Nobody had anything left. I don’t blame anyone for that — there was simply nothing left to give. But I needed someone to hold that corner for me and nobody could. So I held it alone.
I want to cry when I go back there. I still get angry. The kind of angry that has nowhere clean to go — because no one protected that for me. No one held that corner while I held mine. I had spent years fighting for my patients with everything I had and when it was my turn, when it was my body and my baby and my milk and my postpartum recovery on the line, I was alone in it. I look around now and see resources and support that simply didn’t exist for me then and I try not to carry a chip on my shoulder about it. I really try.
My husband is a wonderful man and a tremendous father and I love him without reservation. But that season left something in me that I’m not sure he can fully see even now. A loneliness that lives in a specific place. We’re working on finding each other again across that distance — that’s the new dance I mentioned. It’s slow and it’s tender and some days it’s hard and we’re in it together.
But I found something else in all of it too. Underneath the grief and the anger and the exhaustion.
I found out I was strong.
Like actually, genuinely, in my bones strong. In a way I had never once given myself credit for. The kind of strength that doesn’t need an audience or a witness or anyone to confirm it. I was doing it in empty triage rooms at 3am and in the newborn nursery between patients and in the dark of my car before a photo session. Nobody was watching. Nobody was handing me anything for it. I was just doing it because it was what was required and discovering in the doing of it that I was someone who could.
That changes you. Finding that out about yourself when nobody is looking changes you in ways that are hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it yet.
(Continue below to Part Three)
There’s a version of power I used to know really well.
The kind I learned in Las Vegas, dancing, watching women command a room with the specific confidence of someone who has stopped apologizing for existing. I got good at it. I learned that real confidence — the bone deep kind, the kind that already knows how the room ends before it walks in — combined with a direct ask, combined with knowing exactly who you are, is the most disarming thing in the world. It works. I watched it work every night.
But somewhere in the last few years that version of power started feeling like a costume I’d outgrown. It still fits technically. I could still put it on. It just doesn’t feel like the truest thing anymore.
Because here’s what I’ve been sitting with, what I’ve been trying to find words for for months now —
The truest version of my own sensuality doesn’t live in anyone else’s presence.
It doesn’t need a response or an audience or somewhere to land. It lives in my body when I’m alone in nature. Bare feet on moss. Smoke and tree bark and the specific weight of water moving over my skin. The sun on my stomach. Wind. Earth. The dark. That’s where I feel it — not performed, not directed at anyone, not currency for anything. Just mine. Completely, entirely mine.
That realization was quiet and enormous at the same time.
Because I spent so long understanding sensuality as something relational. Something transactional even. In Las Vegas I watched it function as a tool, a language, a way of moving through the world that could get you things — safety, money, being chosen. And the culture we live in absolutely backs that up. It tells women constantly that their sensuality is most valuable when it’s pointed outward. When it’s useful to someone.
I don’t want that anymore.
And I don’t want the stuff either — the things that desire used to feel like it was for. What I want now, what I am genuinely hungry for in a way that surprised me when I finally named it, is intimacy. Real intimacy. The kind that’s slow and asks something of you and doesn’t have an easy ending. I have a handful of friends I can call at any hour after any length of silence and just talk. Really talk. Say the thing I didn’t know needed saying and have someone receive it without flinching, reflect something back that makes me grow a little, ask me to try something just slightly past my edges. I live for those calls. I would trade almost anything for more of them.
That’s what I’m reaching toward now. In my friendships. In my marriage. In the room when I’m photographing women.
Being fully known. Saying the true thing. Being met.
I don’t have a clean ending for this because I don’t think there is one. I’m in the middle of it. I’m following something that doesn’t have a destination yet — just a direction, and a feeling in my body when I’m moving the right way, and a growing certainty that the images I most want to make are the ones that live out there too. In water. In earth. In low light. With women who are also done performing. Who are also, quietly, learning to ask instead of force.
I think that’s what this work has always been trying to be.
I’m just finally catching up to it.
XOXOX,
Kristen
