The year I turned 40 I, for some reason, decided to take a self portrait everyday using my iMac camera. I, honestly, am not sure what possessed me to do this. But I did it like clockwork every morning for a year and then some. It didn’t matter what my emotional state was and it didn’t matter what I looked like at the moment. I took a photo.

A couple of years ago I posted the photos on my blog. They were up for a few days and then I became too self conscious and made the post private. There is so much raw emotion in there. That year was really an emotionally trying year. So many life-changing things happened. I got a new job.  I moved to Oregon. My step-father died. My mom almost died of Pneumonia. I got really sick.  I got several tattoos. I moved again.

Recently I re-discovered the iPhone app, Everday. I switched my daily selfie ritual to that app years and years ago when I discovered it. Since then I have deleted it and re-installed on my phone probably 5 times. Each time deleting all of the self portraits I’d made up until that point. Well, I re-installed it a few weeks ago and noticed that they made some improvements and upgrades. One of those upgrades was that you can import photos into a new timeline. So I imported my “year that I turned 40” photos and made them into a video. I feel much better about sharing a 15 second video, rather than a gallery of photos. So here you go. a year (give or take) of a very emotional part of my life distilled down into 15 seconds.