A Wild, Precious Life
On having absolutely no idea what I'm doing but loving every second of the uncertainty of it all
This time last year, I’d gotten thee fattest paycheck of my adult life.
After ten years of living hand to mouth, I scored a commercial job — my first — and my bank account went from literally two digits to six digits, overnight. I joked with my producer that I planned on just staring at the number, and maybe not sending over the production funds. I joked with my ex-husband-turned-roomate that might just run off to Mexico with the money.
My partner of ten years and I had, a few month prior, decided to amicably separate.
We’d been married just a month shy of four years. I was a person who was never sold on the institution, but like everyone around me, I was still deprogramming from my domestication as a queer person and as a Black person.
The previous spring of 2021, I ended up in the emergency room after having a full symptom panic attack which I rightfully mistook for a heart attack.
I thought I was going to die at the age of thirty-three, which is not at all unheard of for Black people as the world turns continually on the cycle of our premature deaths. I left that emergency room with the knowledge that I was not only deeply unhappy but the most unsafe I’d felt since my abusive childhood and needed to make some serious changes in how I was living my life.
The previous—and now infamous, life-altering—year of 2020, forced me to acknowledge the ways in which white supremacy was too often having the final say in the outcomes in my life. I could no longer reconcile my adjacency to a hostile, abusive, violent white family I had married into after making the choice to become estranged from my own Black family of origin due to it’s culture of hostility, abuse, and violence.
I could no longer reconcile the deep longing I’d carried most of my life around living a solo life focused on the preservation of my autonomy with being married and my cohabitation of a decade.
I wasn’t doing what I hoped I would with my one wild and precious life, and so, I took the necessary steps to seize that life with little guarantee I would have the continuing means to do so, given the requirements of late stage capitalism.
Holed up in a hip hotel room in a bustling, trendy LA neighborhood, I invited my partner over for us to talk, for me to tell him that I needed us to separate in order to live the life I knew I could no longer deny myself. After that conversation, I picked up my phone to see a series of missed calls and text messages from my freelance agent informing me that I’d won the bid for my first commercial job.
I did end up going to Mexico — Oaxaca, specifically — last April after receiving my portion of payment for the job for a few days. It was the beginning of what my therapist has dubbed my ‘new normal’ — after two decades of living to survive, I was entering my era of abundance.
I worked a total of five days on set as a photographer last year.
I spent eleven months of 2022 as a dilettante — I put away a years worth of rent and bill money, I redecorated my apartment with new pieces of furniture I’d always wanted. I went to estate sales, purchasing inventory for the bookstore concept I was dreaming up. I took my friends out to dinner and spoiled them. I redirected my little pot of gold to the business endeavors of friends and donated to mutual aid efforts and fundraising goals for folks who needed monetary support. I got my septum and my ears pierced. I bought myself an aqua colored Nintendo Switch.
I lay on my brand new velvet couch and daydreamed for hours on end, uninterrupted by anxiety, fear, uncertainty. I indulged after so many years of just feeling the relief of making rent on time, after so many years of not being able to do anything nice for myself.
I did what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted without having to worry about if I would be able to keep a roof over my head or be able to feed myself or pay my bills on time.
For the first time in my adult life.
It took less than a year to reset my expectations of what I could make of this wild, precious life of mine. Just a little time where all my needs were met, where I was the most resourced and supported I had ever been, where I could move with the Universe in total alignment, where the energy I had wasted before on anxiety, on stress, on uncertainty, on doubt, on co-dependency, instead went towards cultivating an interior life filled with possibility, joy, and spontaneity. Just those few months changed the course of my life, propelled me forward, causing me to befriend progression instead of seeing forward motion as my enemy.
It is only now I recognize this — progression — is actually what it means to live a fully human life.
Feist said, “there’s so much past inside the present”. Christina Sharpe tells us “the past is a position” and Sadiya Hartman suggests we can continually inhabit the past to learn from that position, rich in information.
Last week I spent my evenings playing a game called Deathloop, wherein the Black main character Colt, has been forced to into an endless timeloop where he is guaranteed to die and start anew the same day over and over again until he discovers how to end the timeloop. It is only by gathering information each day from the “past” that he is able to take the steps to actually move forward towards his progression.
That is what my life has always been (a death loop, with what the generational efforts towards my eradication and extermination), it is what an intentional life is about (accepting that we are all guaranteed to die), and what propels me forward (I’ve survived many deaths — social death, the death of family estrangement, the continual dying of discovering the world will not support me the way it supports white people) even though I don’t have the guarantee of wealth — I’ve navigated generational financial precarity enough to know that while the coffers are bare in this moment, they won’t always be.
I know having nothing means I can risk it all because what is there to risk anyway?
When one of my best friends invited me to become editor at his publishing studio, I said yes without having to think twice about it. My income wasn’t needed to support a family, anymore. I was working towards my transition out of commercial photography, quietly towards turning my personal artistic practice to a fine art practice. I had enough savings left over to work for several months without pay as the studio navigates its start up phase.
And, after a decade of talking cash shit about being able to do most photo editors jobs better than they actually do their jobs, I would be in position to put my money where my motherfucking mouth had always been.
I was ready to cash that check.
As a newly minted book editor, I’ve acquired over twenty projects to be published between 2023 and 2024, a majority of which are first time monographs by Black women photographers, yet these projects extend across a range of artistic practices, genres, and experimental forms where design, language, optical technologies, and archival practices intersect.
That bookstore I was buying inventory for and dreaming about? Now a reality. Through one of my closest collaborators, Speculation Bookshop will be opening a brick and mortar in Chicago, Il.
And as such, I’ve made the decision to return to Chicago, permanently, this spring.
I’m working simultaneously on my debut monograph, a new body of self portraiture work, and an essay collection about the dangers of domestication. I am lucky to work with and for a cohort of incredible talents as both an editor and an artist. I am especially lucky to work with some of my family — Matthew and Kiki — who have granted me the precious gift of trusting in my curiosity, ability, and demonstrated talent as a writer, a photographer, a researcher and archivist, a coalition builder, and a no-shit-taker.
That I am able to bypass the bullshit of the industrial, commercial book publishing system is a blessing that is not at all lost on me — I wouldn’t have this title if not for the both of them recognizing the need for creating a different kind of publishing company and experience not rooted in capitalist aims of competition and exclusion.
My dear friend Lauren Crew recently told me, “We are not meant to live this life alone,” and I felt that.
We are not islands unto ourselves.
We need each other, but, more, we want each other. Those of us who give into the desire of wanting others seem to experience a purity of joy that is impossible to eradicate or exterminate. What we want most as a species, I think, is to be wanted. To revel in the experience of being connected to one another.
It’s what I’ve longed for my whole life — a place to belong.
That place resides within me and I open the doors to my belonging space to those I want to be wanted by, who also want to be wanted by me. That reciprocity is also what makes this life wild and precious.
I’m thrilled, every morning, for the opportunity to start all over again.
It feels so good to return to this space of exploration after several years away. I’m excited to share with you all again! Reading over the last several months got me excited to revive this space, so thank you Gioncarlo! Moving forward, I won’t be doing paid subscriptions here as I don’t want Stripe or Substack getting any kickback off of me. However, I am in the process of fundraising for my move to Chicago, through sale of limited edition prints via For The Birds Trapped in Airports, which launches April 15th, 2023 — I’ll be sending out an email for the pre-order link then! If you wish to help me fund raise, I would be so grateful for you to send any monetary support for this newsletter and/or helping me move back to Chicago via Venmo, @OrianaKoren. Thanks for being part of the timeloop! XO - O
I have had this sitting in my inbox and finally got a chance to read it today. I’m so proud of you and so impressed by how you manage to prioritize your humanity and your needs. Thank you for sharing with us, I know it is not easy! Congratulations on this move to Chicago, the publishing company, and all the abundance deservingly coming your way! Sending you so much love. And I know I owe you an email, sweet angel!
What a joy to read this, Oriana. I felt myself exhaling and relaxing into my body as I read about your successes and growth. Although we didn't see much of each other in person, I will miss your presence in Los Angeles, and I wish you the best in Chicago. You are a beautiful and lively person, hopefully I can share a hot drink with you next time I find myself in Chicago.
-Caron