ABOUT ME

LAUREN OSMULSKI

Born and raised in Peoria, Illinois moved to Rapid City, South Dakota for 5 years and currently based in Nashville, Tennessee. Preserving my experiences with each snap.

Fanzi Annika Photography

Photography allows us the ability to make time stand still and preserves the emotions felt in that instant. It remembers each captured moment long after our minds have lost the sentiment.

Often when you lose something as a child, the first thing your mother says is “go retrace your steps” or “look in the last place you remember having it.”

But where do you start when you’re not entirely sure where you had it last? And what if you never really had it to begin with? Moreover, how do you find those intangibles like your sense of self?

Despite the doubts and countless what-ifs or worst-case scenarios my mind tried to plant in my soul, I was determined to find what I had lost and capture it through photographs to memorialize this journey. So I went to the last place I remembered having it…

Memories were lurking around every corner. Some flooded my soul with an unsettling anxiety yet others washed over with a calming stillness I had long forgotten. With every glimpse into those moments I’ve already passed through, there was an impending sense of dread. Maybe I had missed a sign that would have pointed me in the right direction long ago.

Maybe if I could go back in time, I would be able to see things in a different light. Maybe if I could find the missed signs, I would be able to change my direction. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so lost now. Maybe I wouldn’t have wasted so much precious time. If only I had paid more attention in those moments. The longer I spent with these thoughts, the more focused I became on dissecting each moment in search of what I had lost.

Those fleeting memories that were once beautifully sewn into the fabric of the past had become so distorted now. It was then that I felt more lost than I had when I started. As I sat amongst the fragments, still trying to piece them together, a still heaviness settled in. I began to wonder if all these moments I was trying so desperately to dissect, had all happened just the way they were intended. Maybe there was no missed sign.

It was then that the still heaviness lightened and the feeling of being lost slowly subsided. The distortions I had created began to come back into focus. The past slowly wrapping my mind in a calming stillness that stopped the obsessive circles it had been running for some time. Whether I had been running to something or away from, it is still not clear. I’m still not entirely sure I’ll ever know, but I’ve come to peace with knowing that everyone of these memories have led me to the place I was meant to be in this moment.