I see you, dear child.

I also think about Liz Gilbert’s book “Big Magic”, where she talks about how ideas are often presented to us backwards. Writers “hear” the last sentences of a book, sometimes the last word even and then you follow the breadcrumbs back to the source, to the loaf.

I presented my first commercial AI job yesterday to a creative director in Stockholm. Afterward we started chatting and I told her I’ve been thinking about going to therapy to deal with some inner child stuff.

“Whenever I think of you, I think of the little boy Jonas”, she said.

It would have been a strange conversation to have after a commercial presentation if it wasn’t for the fact that Johanna is an ex girlfriend of mine. Therapy has been on my mind this week for a number of reasons, my wife and I have talked about something in psychology called Internal Family Systems. One of the elements of this, as I understand it, is how we create versions of ourselves to protect parts we feel need to be protected.

It's a tender and almost tangible way of seeing how we do things to protect our inner child.

Börje Salming has also been on my mind, a Swedish hockey player who died this week of ALS. I remember tv images from the 70s, when Börje got a standing ovation for 12 minutes at Canada Cup in Toronto. How he skated around the ice in circles like an embarrassed 8 year old boy, the pads and helmet couldn’t hide the child from peering out through the façade.

I often think of the inner child when I take someone’s portrait at a wedding. I see you in there, I think when a grown man looks back at me with insecure eyes. A bride once asked me if I could make her look pretty. “I can’t”, I said, “but I will show you that you are beautiful”.

I was also working with AI yesterday and in frustration of Mid Journey’s problems with rendering fingers, I added the word hockey to the prompt I was working on. May as well add hockey gloves to hide the sausage fest, I thought to myself. What came back was something different though. In the wedding scene I was working on, a boy in a hockey helmet looked back at me and it was a very tender and vulnerable image, at least to me. I saw an inner child and the protections we carry around. I thought about the relationships I’ve been in, how we all bring our pads and helmets from before, how we’re nothing but children, how I’ll always be that little boy Jonas. I thought about wedding photography, I thought about hockey, about Börje Salming and Internal Family Systems. I thought about the movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, because that’s what this is. The creative director in me screams "make it about ONE idea, maybe go with the inner child, not relationships, not hockey, not every ducking thing all at once!”, but I don’t have to, because this is where I am, this is where I’ve been and this is where I’m going.

I see you, dear child.

#jonaspetersonprintshop #ai #midjourney #notphotography