I’ve Thought About Doing This for Years

A lot of women don’t find River Rose once, think about it for five minutes, and book.

They come back.

They look through the photos, save a few, read a story that sounds familiar, think about what they might wear, and wonder what their own photographs could look like. Then they close the page and tell themselves, “Maybe later.”

A few months pass, and they do it again. For some women, that goes on for years.

Usually, there isn’t one dramatic reason behind the delay. It’s a handful of smaller things that keep making later feel easier. Maybe you want to lose some weight first. Maybe you don’t feel as comfortable in your body as you used to. Maybe spending money on yourself is harder to justify than spending it on everyone else. Maybe the idea sounds exciting until you picture yourself standing in front of a camera and suddenly feel exposed.

And sometimes, nothing is particularly wrong. Life is busy, something else always needs attention first, and this keeps getting pushed into the category of something you’ll do eventually.

One of the easiest things to tell yourself is that you’ll book when you feel more ready. After you lose the weight. After work settles down. After the kids get older. After you feel better about yourself. After you have more confidence.

The problem is, most of those things don’t come with a clear finish line. You can lose weight and still find something else you don’t like in a photograph. You can get through one busy season and immediately find yourself in another. You can wait until you feel more confident and realize confidence wasn’t really what was keeping you from doing it.

There’s nothing wrong with waiting. But it helps to know what you’re waiting for.

For a lot of women, photographs themselves are part of the problem. Most of the pictures they see of themselves are quick phone photos. Someone catches them mid-sentence, the camera is too close, the light is bad, the angle isn’t flattering, their posture is off, and they weren’t ready for the picture in the first place.

Then they look at that one frame and decide, “That’s what I look like.”

It isn’t a complete picture of what you look like. It’s what you looked like from one camera position, under one set of lighting conditions, during one fraction of a second.

That difference is easy to understand when we’re talking about someone else. It gets much harder when it’s your own face or body in the photograph.

If you’ve spent years avoiding cameras because you hate pictures of yourself, booking an entire session built around being photographed can feel like a pretty big leap.

But body image isn’t always the reason.

You might feel perfectly fine about your body and still have no idea how you’re supposed to pose. You might worry you’ll feel awkward. You might not know what to wear. Privacy may be a concern. Maybe you’ve had a bad experience with a photographer before. Maybe you’re thinking about what your partner will say. Maybe the money is available, but spending that much on yourself still feels uncomfortable.

Those are all different concerns, but “I’m just not ready yet” has a way of wrapping them together into one easy answer.

Sometimes it helps to pull them apart.

If it’s cost, call it cost. If it’s your body, call it that. If being photographed makes you nervous, say it. If you don’t understand what happens during a session, ask. If you’re worried you’ll look awkward, talk about that specifically.

A specific hesitation is a lot easier to understand than a vague feeling that maybe someday you’ll finally be ready.

There are also women who assume they need a bigger reason before they’re allowed to do something like this. A milestone birthday. A wedding. A divorce. Weight loss. An anniversary. Some major change that makes the decision feel easier to justify.

Plenty of women do book for those reasons.

Plenty don’t.

Sometimes the reason is simply, “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”

That’s enough to take the idea seriously.

It doesn’t mean you have to book. Thinking about a session and deciding to do one are still two different things. But if you’ve been coming back to the idea for a year, two years, or longer, it may be worth figuring out what keeps bringing you back and what keeps making you leave.

That’s really what the consultation is for.

Not to convince you that you need a session. It gives you a chance to ask the questions you’ve been carrying around, understand what the process looks like, talk through whatever has kept you on the fence, and make a decision with more information than “maybe later.”

You don’t have to book because you’ve been thinking about it for years.

But if you have been thinking about it for years, it’s probably worth finally figuring out why.