Self-judgement & my photo on a billboard

I’m an anxious person

As someone who indexes higher on the anxiety chart than most, I have a fairly steady baseline of self-judgment.

This week was an exception, though - my inner roommate (the voice in my head) was running rampant with a hefty dose of comparison to others and imposter syndrome.

To steal Still Woozy’s words, “you wouldn’t last a day in my brain, you’d probably go insane… “

6AM Surf

This was especially the case last Friday. It’s 6 AM, I’m groggy driving to Ventura to surf with a friend, and my inner roommate is running wild. “You won’t be able to sustain self-employment… you’re spending all of your hard-earned savings…. RunWell will fail when you launch…” blah blah blah…

As I drove us down the coast, there was an electronic billboard to our left. I glanced up at the Billboard and thought, “hey, the boat on the billboard looks like a Laser,” a small, single-handed racing sailboat that I owned for a few years in High School.

Next thought, “looks like someone is hiking out of the Laser dragging their hand on the water, just like in the photo I took in High school….”

Then it hit me.

This was my photo on the Billboard. My inner roommate promptly shut up as I shouted what I had realized to my friend Matt who was in the passenger seat.

We were driving fast and quickly passed the billboard, but I was 99% sure it was my image. We were headed to meet our friend Javier for a surf, so I opted not to turn the car around to confirm what I had seen.

How could this be? I uploaded this image to Unsplash years ago. Here it is on my profile - 861,978 views, 5,523 downloads.

After an early surf session followed by breakfast in Ventura, Matt and I returned to the billboard, and waited as different ads cycled through. I stared up, camera in hand, waiting to see if it was my image.

Five minutes passed, and we were about to head out and chalk this up to me seeing things in an early morning daze.

Just as I’m putting the lens cap on my camera and about to give up, Matt goes “dude…” and points at the billboard.

There it was.

Story of the shot

I actually didn’t take this photo. It was shot by my friend Alex, who also owned a laser at the time. We had taken our iPhones out that day, tethering them to our lifejackets using LifeProof cases and string (at this time, iPhones were not water resistant)

This was my favorite shot of that day, and I had initially edited it to submit to Red Bull Illume. While the image was not selected for the exhibition, this one was.

The learning

I truly view this as a sign from God/the universe to be easier on myself.

Despite the obvious fact that the internet connects us all and Unsplash is the go-to source online for free images, the probability of all this still feels immensely small, especially when you consider that the photo was only displayed on the billboard once every 5 minutes.

The juxtaposition of the self judgment in my head and the real world SIGN of my image on a billboard feels too ironic to be happenstance.

It’s time to be kinder to myself. It’s time to stop the self-judgment.

Thank you for reading. I sincerely hope that hearing this story will help you be kinder to yourself, too.

Michael
Writing to you from a hot apartment in San Diego, California.