I had about a million hours of podcasts to listen to at work today, and the last one that I listened to before I left the office for the day was a special broadcast from the Third Coast International Audio Festival, via their Re:Sound podcast — an hour long talk from Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad, and it was exactly what I needed to hear. Abumrad focused on the idea of finding, owning, and sharing your voice, and even if he does so in radio and audio broadcasts and I do so in photographs, I was staggered and inspired by his talk. It is hard to trust yourself and your voice, sometimes, and when it is hard, that’s the time you need to trust yourself most. Abumrad talks about how he and his Radiolab colleagues call it being in the “dark German forest”, that fear of your own work and fear of your work taking you frightening and new places, and it moved me to hear someone so talented talk so openly about his fear and lack of trust in his own work.

It made me want to go take photos, and do things that scare me.

You can listen to Jad Abumrad’s talk for Third Coast here, and I recommend that you do it.