I recently spent three weeks travelling around Poland by train, visiting many of it's major Cities. Beginning with Poznan, I was now on my second stop on the tour, Gdansk.
My first full day in Gdansk was a dull, wet, overcast day. Not a great day for photography, so I decided instead to use the day to be productive and work on my laptop, editing some of my photos from India which I still had to share.
Before that though I decided to at least walk around the City to see what it had to offer and do some location scouting so I knew exactly where to photograph on my remaining days when the weather looked more ideal.
What I quickly discovered was that Gdansk is a very beautiful and picturesque City and I found many different locations I wanted to photograph over the next couple of days.
I then tried to find a quiet little café, with WiFi and preferably a power outlet so that I could edit some of my photos from Jodhpur and stream it live on Twitch - something I'd recently started doing.
I soon found a Costa, which is usually a reliable choice for both decent Wi-Fi and a power source. I ordered a coffee, sat down, got my laptop out, only to find that the Wi-Fi wasn't working.
I spent the next couple of hours walking around trying to find somewhere suitable - Wi-Fi and quiet enough so people could hear me talk through my photo edits during my stream on Twitch.
Eventually I found one such place, so I got my laptop out, connected to the Wi-Fi, opened my streaming software, only for it not to register my microphone, making my stream completely pointless.
So alas, I was still not able to stream. It felt like I had wasted the day, hadn't been productive at all and it felt like just another day when everything seemed against me. Even small, simple things like this just don't seem to work out for me.
I began to get frustrated. It may seem pathetic to get frustrated at something so small when I actually should be happy at being in Gdansk but this is just one small example on one typical day of my life.
My life is so far away from how I imagined it would be at this point. I've always had high standards but rather than getting closer to my goals, it constantly feels like everything is just against me.
As I walked back to my accommodation I forced myself to think about the positives I could take from the day (apart from the obvious, being in such a beautiful City - it seemed I'd lost perspective on my life so much even travelling alone had lost its novelty).
I soon gave myself credit for at least trying and for having good intentions. Things might not work out as you like, even little things, but at least I am continuing to work and at least trying to do the right things.
I still haven't given up, I continue to pursue my dreams and don't let these many, constant set backs and kicks to my morale stop me from trying and it is exactly this resilience which days liike this will only make stronger and which will eventually be the reason I do acheive my dreams.
Getting paid to travel, becoming a professional photographer or digital nomad is not as easy as paying a couple of hundred dollars to sign up to some jokers course. It takes a long time, a lot of hard work, a lot of stresses, a lot of compromises and a lot of resilience. Despite what Instagram makes it look like.
So from now on I am going to give myself the credit I deserve more often and share more of these personal stories as I try to develop a career as a travel photographer here on this blog.
In a world where everyone is showing a highlight reel of their lives on social media, which is often fake. In a world of selling bullshit courses which claim to enable you to earn millions of dollars in no time at all, drive fast cars and travel the world - I feel my story needs to be heard more than ever because it is real and it is the truth. And that unfortunately is pretty rare!
Thankfully I did enjoy the rest of my time in Gdansk, exploring and photographing this beautiful City. You can see what I else I got up to while here in the video at the top of this page.
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