"SUP?! How RU? OMG Freddie totally asked me to the social. JUST broke up with Lisa, what if I say yes? She's going to be so mad. But he's soooo hot and soooo pop! What should I do???"

As teen life evolved int0 high school, so did my tattered journals. They groaned under the sheer emotional weight of teen angst, first kisses, true loves, broken hearts, and prom dates. They became my crutch as I left for college a thousand miles away from the potato fields of Idaho to the beaches of San Diego, and they documented my life as a scared, lonely student in the foreign culture of Southern California. My journals were me. They were my deepest prayers and my greatest fears. They were my outlets and my safe zones.

A few months after meeting Jeff, he quickly discovered my love for journaling and bought me a brand new one when my most recent edition filled up. That new journal chronicled the first year of our relationship and my freshman year of college, my solo trip across the U.S. in my station wagon that summer, and my travels as a study abroad student in Spain that fall. It was the period when I truly fell in love with writing and I spent hours exploring my nomadic college life in words and phrases, discovering new ways to describe familiar emotions.

And that's where it ended.

When I arrived home from my semester in Spain, I parked my station wagon outside of my friend's house for the night. I was moving back to college, so my car was full of everything I owned. In the middle of the night, someone broke the front window and stole my backpack from the back seat, leaving everything else untouched. Right next to that backpack was a second shoulder bag with my camera, my computer, my disc man, and all of my CDs.

I wish that they had stolen that second bag.

Nothing in the stolen backpack was valuable to whoever took it, but everything inside was precious to me. Inside was the bible I was given when I became a Christian five years earlier, all of my rolls of film from my three months in Spain, and the journal Jeff had given me.

It felt like every memory I owned from that pivotal year in my life had vaporized, like they never existed. The words, the photos, the moments - their disappearance cut deep into my gut and I could barely think about how much I had lost in the space of one night's sleep.

I was so entirely crushed by that experience, that I haven't journaled since. I bought a new journal to replace the old one, but it has sat unopened for seven years. I felt like journaling itself had been stolen from me. As if something was telling me that it was time to grow up. That I wasn't my 12 year-old-self anymore, scribbling away with purple ink at midnight and hiding my notebook in a wooden box my grandfather gave me, locking it with an old-fashioned metal key. I couldn't just lock away my secrets anymore, shoving my hopes and fears and dreams underneath the bed.

It was time to grow up.

So I did. I poured myself into college, became a wife, learned how to function in the Southern California world, built a business, and started to blog. I've kept my inner most thoughts to myself - under wraps -  burying that naive college student under seven years of 'real life.' Long story short(ened)... this all came to a head this past weekend. And Jeff bought me a journal to replace the old one.

It's a Moleskine journal - apparently the exact same kind of journal used by Van Gogh, Hemingway and Picasso. It's French. It's a brand with a long history of riding within the satchels of the nomadic artists and thinkers of the world. It scares me. It confuses me. It excites me.

I'm anxious to get started, to break in the first pages, but I would love to hear a shout out from my journaling peeps out there. Does anyone else love to journal, especially as an adult? Or does anyone use a Moleskine? What are your favorite times and places to journal? Or what memories do you guys have of journaling as a kid? With blogging being so widespread these days, I'd love to be encouraged by those that still put pen to paper and scratch the pages of a physical notebook!

Hugs,
Erin

Oh it matters. Have you ever been to my closest Starbucks? Lemme ‘splain.

We moved to our neighborhood three and a half years ago, a month after I left my day job to work on our photography business full-time. The second the movers left, I grabbed my laptop and strutted out the door to go work at our local Starbucks for the very first time. After a year of working in a corporate office all day and editing photos at night, I felt soooooo cool to be driving to our shopping center in the middle of the day…with my laptop…to work from a coffeehouse.

Isn’t that the modern American Dream?? To be one those coffee shop people? I was one of them now.

All of my ex-coworkers were probably at the weekly team meeting right at that second, I thought as I left the garage and headed down the street. They would be grinning at the indecipherable corporate speak from our HR boss while secretly wishing they were me – cool, hip, and finally free.

I was sure of it.

But when I turned the corner into the shopping center, the parking lot was overflowing. It was FULL of midday shoppers. Since when is 10am busy? I thought. But Starbucks was even worse. The line for my drink took fifteen minutes, and I couldn’t find a seat among any of the twenty or so tables in the store.

I figured that it was just an oddly busy day, so I tried again later that week. Same story. Everywhere I turned, the large store was jammed with people – moms with strollers, students buried in books, writers at their laptops, suits pacing on their cell phones, and realtors. Oh the realtors. Why do they only come in packs of five?? After multiple tries, I finally discovered that the best time to work at our Starbucks was between 8:00pm and close.

Welcome to suburbia, I thought. Where everybody works from home. I wanted to run into the Starbucks and yell, “Don’t you people have JOBS!!”

A year later when my delighted husband quit his day job and packed up his laptop bag for his first real Coffeehouse Work Day, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was the worst time of day to go. An hour later he came back home dejected. He didn’t feel special, he said. There are so many other people in our neighborhood that work from home too...

‘I know,’ I said, consoling him and patting him on the back. ‘We’re just normal.’

We thought the American Coffeehouse Dream would feel so different.

But we never gave up on that Coffeehouse Dream. After a while I learned some slick ninja maneuvers to grab my favorite tables at Starbucks and have since memorized every location of outlets and the best seats for great wi-fi in the store. So even though my Starbucks always seems to be full, I’ve come to love that fullness. The point of working from Starbucks is to be away from our office and be surrounded by other warm bodies. By civilization. To hear movement and chatter and espresso machines around me. It keeps me focused. It keeps me inspired.

So maybe it's not so much about feeling special. Maybe it's about togetherness. As if by showing up to my second office, I can feel like me and that insurance guy next to the creamers are making our dreams happen in our very own shared corporate space. Which means that there are a lot of dreamers out there just like us. And that's a pretty cool thing about a jam-packed Starbucks.

Hugs,
Erin

You have no idea, dear bloggy-blog, how true this statement is for me right now. Our time in San Francisco has been less about dreams and more about my figuring out how to dream. How to give myself permission to dream.

I'm not gonna lie. It's been an emotional ride for me. And even though our San Fran adventures may come across as amazing and glamorous, for the writer/photographer inside of me it's been more like sandpaper - the rough edges of this city wearing away my tough layers, exposing the self-rejection that plagues my inner workings. I love this city, and Jeff and I are eating, exploring, and working our way through it's streets and coffeehouses, but all of this time away from home that we've given ourselves to think and reflect has only lead me back into myself.

And that's a hard thing for me, dear bloggy-blog. Coming face to face with the dark corners of ME has never been a very delightful experience...

I know I just wrote about how he's the Honey Badger of self-confidence, but I have to seriously give a huge shout out to my hubby and best friend, Jeff Youngren. He's my rock. And if the last few days have been any indication, he's a rock to a lot of people. Watching so many folks turn to him in their hour of need (including myself) has made me more proud of him than ever. He's a steady mind, a comforting soul, and a warm shield against the storms of life.

After a few days of beating myself down, wearing myself out, and just plain driving myself crazy from trying to keep up with my own ridiculous benchmarks of success, popularity, and power, Jeff took me by the hand, lead me to the Cheesecake Factory in Union Square, and bought me anything I wanted on the menu (don't judge - CF is my guilty pleasure). Over a ginormous piece of Tiramisu cheesecake (and a pile of lactose pills), we talked. And there's something so magical about Jeff's confidence. His unwavering belief in us.

Because it's UNWAVERING. You'd think the guy would feel an inch of doubt every so often. But no. He's a Honey Badger - he always believes and he always knows. And if someone doesn't like it, well then he just don't care. And that pretty much makes me the luckiest doubting, self-rejecting writer/photographer in the city.

Hugs,
Erin

But Jeff … well… Jeff has the confidence of a Honey Badger. He just don’t care. He has this relentless ocean of self-assurance that makes what little confidence I have look like one of those smelly puddles on the street next to the sidewalk - everybody avoids it and nobody wants to talk about what’s in it.

We got these free Muni passes when we got here to San Francisco that allows us use any public transportation we want for seven days. We’re here for two weeks so we decided to start the passes on our sixth day, and since we were basically bound by walking distance, we got to know our surrounding neighborhoods pretty well. Except for our bike riding adventure across the Golden Gate Bridge, we basically found a new Starbucks everyday and worked from there on our laptops (and yep, most days we ended up at two different Starbucks and we still didn’t see all of them that were in walking distance – there are that many Starbucks in the city).

Sheesh.

So when the sixth day came and it was time to use our Muni passes for the bus and subway, I felt strangely nervous. I even found myself wanting to turn to Jeff to say, “You know hon, I think we could wait another day…” Why? Cuz I was just plain scared. I had gotten comfortable. I knew that we would have to take quite a few busses throughout the city and I have only taken the city bus one other time in my life and that was in Singapore where crime – quite literally – doesn’t exist. I’ve never taken a public bus system anywhere in the US and with one look at the jumbled bus map, I was certain we were going to get lost and end up in the shady part of town where they strip off your leather boots and make you walk home in your socks. I could just see them pointing their fingers at us, laughing and taunting the poor tourists that didn’t know the green line was the unspoken ‘don’t get on this after 7pm or else we'll steal your footwear’ bus route.

What can I say? I’m a mole. Over 27 years, I have built my warm, comfortable, white woman, J.Crew lover space and didn’t see any reason to mess with the conditions. But life (and Jeff) has taught me otherwise. And even though (story of my life) I found myself wanting to turn and run in my favorite leather boots, I took a look at Jeff’s honey badger shoulders as he hopped onto the bus… and I followed. And we ended up at the comfiest, coziest Starbucks that we had discovered yet down by Fisherman’s Wharf.

And that’s why I trust the Honey Badger. Because he just don’t care.

Hugs,
Erin

Ho boy. It's been a long month of travel...

Jeff and I are back in the house after a month of Indiana, Oregon, Philly, and PartnerCon in San Diego. So the worst part about this mind-fog is that I felt guilty. Being gone for that long means that I have a mountain of work waiting in the office and shouldn't I be at the computer powering through it? Why am I being such a baby about a bit of lame mind-fog?

So I clicked off the vaccuum and trudged upstairs towards the office, my cold sock feet dragging along the dirty floors, running into Jeff as he headed out the door for an errand. He was working through HIS to-do list like a madman. I could feel my guilt multiplying.

Before I could pass into the office, he grabbed me into a sudden bear hug. "You know, if I came home and you were taking a bath, I wouldn't be pissed." He smiled.

"You sure? I have so much to do. You'll think I'm lazy..." I mumbled, burying my foggy forehead into his shoulder trying to hide from the monster of to-dos creeping from my desk, not able to meet his productive and efficient eyes.

"I've never thought that about you ever, and I'm not about to start."

I haven't taken a bath in like a year. We have an enormous bathtub too - one of those deep, wide bathtubs separate from the walk-in shower. The second I first saw that beast in our master bath, I was sold on our house like a cow at auction. It's the only bathtub that is actually big enough for my long legged self and doesn't make me feel like a giantess in a kiddie pool. Going once, going twice, SOLD to the lady with the spider legs.

So after a full year of lying dormant, I dusted off my collection of bubble baths, revved up the bathtub, cranked up a Fresh Air podcast, and gave in to the fog in my mind. I think Jeff knew there was no point in fighting it - which is why I love him so much. He always seems to know what I don't think I need.

There's so much coming to the bloggy-blog this week and next - and I wanted to share a few favorites from PartnerCon in San Diego last week, taken by our friend and local San Diego wedding photographer, Kent West. The first is Jeff on his panel, "Creating a Client-Focused Business", and me during my shared presentation with Elizabeth Villa, Katie Humphreys, and Rachel LaCour, "Become a Content Marketing Machine". And yes, I was paying attention. I was just Instagramming. I may have an unhealthy addiction to Instagram...

Hugs,

Erin

October. It's our busiest time of year with weddings, travel, and speaking, so life right now is chaos. Controlled, organized, systematized, non-stop chaos.

Monday the 17th, we hopped on a red-eye flight that began an entire month of non-stop travel. We flew to Indiana to visit Jeff's brother Dan for the week and to speak to a group of photographers at the Indianapolis PUG. At the end of the trip, after four hours of sleep, we hopped on a crack-of-dawn flight back home on Friday morning, worked like mad to get ahead of work, shot a FABULOUS wedding on Saturday, and then hopped on another crack-of-dawn flight on Sunday to fly to Oregon for the For The Love Workshop that we're teaching with two other amazing photographers (that's where we are as this posts. There is no cell service or internet during the retreat, so this is being written on that second crack-of-dawn flight from Indianapolis on Friday morning - yet another thing to check off of the list. "Don't forget to schedule blogs for next week while we're in Oregon...")

When we return from Oregon, we'll be home for a day, and then we're flying to Philadelphia to teach a mentor session (can't wait Ashley!), shoot an engagement session with sweethearts Pepa and Isabel, and photograph Mike and Sarah's country club wedding (OMG this wedding is going to be GORGEOUS). We fly home from Philly on Sunday and then drive straight from the airport to speak at Pictage's PartnerCon for the week, an amazing conference for wedding and portrait photographers that's taking place in San Diego. Then we have a handful of awesome weddings and that brings us to Thanksgiving.

So life is chaotic. But that's the nature of this business. Yes, I break down in tears, I get impatient, I pick fights with Jeff, and I blame the world for my problems when the stress level reaches a max, but the nature of our business in particular is that I'm not alone. I have Jeff to comfort me with a shoulder to cry on, calm me with a reassuring "You're doing great babe," and have my back by changing laundry, doing dishes, downloading images, and petting Gracie when I'm packing our suitcases. And I have our amazing employees, Garrett and Julie, to bring me back to sanity with hilarious YouTube videos, the most positive attitudes ever, ears to listen, and a passion for working hard that rivals my own desperate ambition to get things done.

So in the midst of this non-stop pace, I have the most amazing people around me to keep pointing my high-wired brain in the right direction when I'm running at full speed and the tornado of life tries to flip me around.

So back to Gracie. Before we leave for any flight, Jeff and I make sure to spend a moment with Gracie, promising her that we'll come back soon so her little kitty sense of time won't think we've left her forever (I mean, Gracie speaks human right?). So as we were rushing around to leave for our red-eye flight to Indiana that would begin an entire month of straight travel, we almost forgot to say goodbye to Gracie. But Jeff remembered at the last minute and Jeff's mom snapped an iPhone pic.

I miss her like crazy, and the poor kitty has to mentally deal with our constant abandonment. If it's this hard to leave a cat, what are we gonna do when we have kids?

Hugs,
Erin

You don’t even have to meet me face to face to see that I am an insecure, imperfect person with lots of issues. I’m sure you can feel it right here on the blog in my writing. It’s everywhere. That’s the problem with insecurity. The more we try to cover it up, the more obvious it becomes.

As a child, I always felt like the runt in my family. I was the youngest of three, and I was painfully stubborn. I was always fighting for attention, which made me not think things through before I spoke or acted, and as a willful, flighty 8 or 9 year old I contracted this nickname, “Erin-head,” because I would say incredibly dumb things (get it - airhead/Erin-head. Clever, I know).

Even though it faded away by junior high, that nickname has stuck with me all of my life.

I can’t tell you how many times I make a mistake or drop something in the kitchen or say something less than intelligent and that nickname crawls up into my stomach like a vulture, just waiting to prey on my lifeless self-esteem. It’s always been there. And I don’t know how long it’s going to stay. That nickname has made me a very reserved and fearful person. Most of the time, I am afraid. I am afraid that I will not have it all together in front of other people, and that I won’t seem smart. So I strive to look and act and feel perfect, because if I’m perfect then I will be loved.

And you know what all of this terrible striving does? The opposite. The more I try to look smart, the more I seem unwise. The more confident I try to act, the more my insecurity seeps through the cracks of my outer shell. The more I attempt to hide stupid mistakes, the more mistakes I end up making. And the worst part is that the more I try to be perfect so that others will love me, the more I alienate them. The more I alienate myself.

And folks, even writing this - just the thought of talking about these insecurities out on the INTERNET - makes me sweat. I am seriously pitting out with cold, clammy underarms while I write this. So attractive.

And I don’t really have a conclusion to this post. There is no happy wrap-up, except that I feel better just writing about it. Jeff knows all about the nickname. He knows how deep it goes. How it rules my character, and scares me from taking risks. He knows the words that trigger a sudden implosion of tears, anger, and utter-emotional breakdown. And he also know knows the words that calm my fears and release my mind from the horrors of a terrible childhood nickname.

He knows, and he loves.

Hugs,
Erin

In the life of a photographer, busy is good. And even though we're in the midst of 5:00am wake up calls, up to our ears in wedding gowns, enduring early morning flights, sleeping in beds that are not our own, and feeding Gracie's abandonment issues, life is good.

And I only say that life is good in the midst of the craziness because I can lean on the most important person in my life for stability, encouragement, inspiration, celebration, and a much needed hug when it all becomes too much. I wasn't always that way. I wasn't always willing to lean on someone else.

But life is so good now that I do.

In case you don't follow Jeff or me on Instagram (follow jeffyoungren, erinyoungren to see pics from our life and our shoots), here's a sneak peek from Jeff from the two day photo shoot this week. I'm so excited to share the rest when the issue is released this fall - it's torture to wait that long!

Hugs,

Erin

I love traveling.

There's nothing like showing up hot and sweaty at a random roadside building that looks like it's supposed to be a restaurant, asking for the best food they serve, cozying up to an oscillating fan with a cold drink, and waiting for whatever comes out of the kitchen. In my experience, 50% of the food we get served is typical and expected (chicken, beans, rice), 30% of the food is surprising and new but totally tasty (salt fish, fried banana), and the other 20% is some local dish that makes me gag (weird bread-fruit-thing). And the plate that the lovely owner brought to our table in St. Lucia was oily, salty, refreshing, and ultimately delicious, even with having a bit of "not-so-goodness" on the side.

I love these kinds of travel meals. They capture the heart of a place. They reveal the flavor of the people that make it and the soul of people that enjoy it. They remind me that as humans we're all mostly the same. That no matter where we come from, at our very core we have many of the same desires, needs, and afflictions.

It also reminds me that we're very different in surprising and wonderful ways. And it's those surprising and wonderful things that make me fall in love with new people and places, and it maintains my healthy addiction to traveling around the world.

But - and this is a big but - there's something I don't like to admit about traveling. Sometimes there's an edge to certain places that I just don't like. I'm not saying that's the case with St. Lucia - it was a beautiful place with incredibly warm and inviting people. But there's times while traveling when the streets smell like sewage, the people aren't super nice, the food just isn't appetizing, the humidity is suffocating, and my body decides to deal me a nasty case of stomach issues and jetlag. Sometimes I don't like sleeping on a rock hard mattress for a week and flushing with a bucket of water. Sometimes I would like to have a real blanket on the bed and not just a random bathroom towel to cozy up with at night. And sometimes - just maybe once - I would like to feel like I'm not going to careen over the edge of a mountain road to a horrible death while riding a janky, non-air-conditioned bus for eight hours.

But I have to remind myself that it's OK not to completely like everything about a place, just like that place may not like everything about me (and my stomach issues. Ech.). And ultimately, the combination of connection, invitation, and aversion about new places becomes a pretty delicious thing.

I've been skimming through our personal pictures that we took while roaming around St. Lucia last week, and I wanted to share just a few. This first image is the door to the restaurant where I had that memorable meal. The rest are just tidbits from around the island.

Hugs,
Erin

Jeff and I have learned to communicate in very special ways and we’ve figured out that when I wake up a little *eh-hem* off-kilter that I just need to let him know. That’s it. I just need to say right away that I’m not feeling in a very happy mood, and then I check myself into a Starbucks for the rest of the day and just write about it.

So as I was rolling out of bed and mentally packing my Starbucks laptop kit, fully prepared for a day of soy lattes and espresso noises, Jeff and his sneaky charms got in the way...

I mean, normally I get super annoyed when he pulls me off of my exercise ball/office chair first thing in the morning, landing me flat on my back on top of Gracie. But instead, we laughed for a full five minutes. Perhaps it was the way my skin rubbed against the exercise ball and sounded like a huge, well, like skin rubbing against a rubber exercise ball.

I’m sure you get it.

And then he just smiled his Jeffy smile the rest of the day. Maybe it was the way he said, “Hello, may I help you?” in the PERFECT receptionist voice after I came back into the office from a bathroom break. Or maybe it was how he played Indiana Jones with Gracie, the hallway, and the exercise ball during lunch.

Or maybe he was just having too good of a day for me to have a bad one.

In any case, I felt better. SO MUCH BETTER. And those of you out there that know Jeff probably know what I’m talking about. You know, the eight-year-old kid inside of him that decides to join us when we need it most?

Yeah, I love it too.

Hugs,

Erin