Investment

"A boudoir shoot is an investment in yourself" is a phrase you are going to see on almost every website for boudoir. It's a cliche, but that doesn't make it any less true. There's a poem that I think of everytime I'm asked why anyone should plunk down the kind of money boudoir shoots require, and it resonates so deeply on how worthwhile this investment in yourself is.

Every Woman I Have Ever Loved

Is still working out how to love herself.

Has a closet full of ghosts and has been to

a hundred funerals of the woman she used to be.

Wonders what wounds her mother carries that

she will never know about. Hopes that the weight

of the world doesn't eventually crush her, that she

is strong enough to handle it all. Wishes a day will

come when she can put it all down, give her

aching shoulders a rest. Wants someone to truly

see her and not make a feast of her kindness

and dreams. Is forever hiding a secret hunger

for what calls to her in the dark. Holds a universe

inside her, but has been told to make herself

smaller despite the paradox. Praise be that

universes are not in the business of listening

to anyone but themselves.

Every woman I have ever loved has thought about it.

The art of disappearing. To be here one day,

and the next, like smoke, simply gone.

• Nikita Gill

My treasured circle of shes, femmes, and theys: a boudoir shoot is not going to magically transform you into someone you are not. Even at my witchiest, I am incapable of such a feat, and I wouldn't want to erase you, anyway. What a boudoir shoot will do is shine a light on the you of now, in all of your radiant complexity, in all of your mulitudes, in all of the fires you burn as, giving you the ability to see you. THAT is what it means to invest in yourself with a boudoir shoot. To create your own effigy as you boldly get to know yourself again.