Last month Char and I shot a wedding in Båstad, Sweden. We decided to extend our trip because we we’re going to be in Europe anyways and, well, why wouldn’t you?
Attached you’ll find some of our favorite shots from the trip. Before you think, ‘Wow those Becks are just traveling the world living the photographer dream – taking photos in crazy cool places,’ I want to give an overview of our 3 weeks in Europe with sheer honesty.
I was immediately overwhelmed when we got back and people started asking about how amazing the trip was and commenting on how epic and dreamy it looked. Of course these were terms that fit what they gathered from our Instagram feeds and Facebook posts. Without giving my answer much thought I nodded along agreeing that, yes, the trip was indeed epic and dreamy; I was letting them answer their own question. But after a few times of this absentminded agreeing I thought to myself,
‘What am I saying? The trip was great, and it was also nothing like I thought it would be and exhausting for both of us, but instead of being a “negative nancy” I think I’ll just give people what they want to hear.’
I was giving people a very small part of the whole truth, and this small part was the shiny, the beautiful, the best parts of our time. Then I got to thinking. If I’m going to tell people out of convenience that our time was just dreamy and fun, what’s stopping me from giving people the whole truth? Even if the whole truth is hard to swallow, or not what they have time to hear, or they were only asking about the trip to be polite.
I’m starting to see just how often we sacrifice our vulnerability for the illusion of perfection.
It’s much easier to let people in on the shiny parts of our life and keep them a safe distance from the ugly and real gritty parts of our day-to-day struggles. The thing is, when we do this, we cut people off from our individual realities the way social media often does with such ease.
Having never been abroad before, my ideas on European travel were limited to what I saw in the movies, read in books, and the countless photos of European architecture and food I occasionally got lost in searching on Instagram/Pinterest. Halfway through the trip I started to worry that we weren’t doing enough, seeing enough, and even worried we weren’t enjoying our time enough. I was sharing photos on Instagram as a way to convince both myself and others that things were all good and we truly were “living the dream.”
What people didn’t get from the pretty pictures was this: we argued through parts of shooting the wedding (the sexy appeal of shooting a destination European wedding doesn’t erase your problems), we both caught heavy colds, keeping us from seeing and doing as much as we wanted to, we got “Hangry” and said mean things to each other, we spent a great chunk of time on metros, missing metros, sleeping on metros, I was convinced I would “find myself” and have some sort of enlightening travel experience where I’d find all the answers to all the problems I was facing at home (didn’t happen).
So there’s my rambling attempt to give you a more holistic view of our time in Europe. Was the trip amazing? Yes. Was it the dreamy, picturesque escape from reality I had expected it be? No. Does it make me a terrible, selfish, and over-privileged ninny for not enjoying every single part of traveling in Europe? Maybe…I’m still trying to answer that one. But mostly I think it just makes me human.
And I think if we can invite others into the hard parts as much as the lovely, if we can embrace the imperfections of our humanity, then maybe the less alone we will feel, and maybe we will even start to see that no matter where we are in the world, whether climbing the Eiffel tower or riding the bus home from a long day at work, we are enough.
–Julia Joy Beck
(All these photos were taken in the following cities: Copenhagen, Denmark / Båstad, Sweden / Helsinger, Sweden / Oslo, Norway / Drammen, Norway / Stavern, Norway / Madrid, Spain / Paris, France)
