hi I'm Tom travat and this is photography adjacent a podcast about photography and everything else each week on our show we speak to artists activists writers and the occasional photographer to learn about life through their lens hello and welcome back to the podcast uh today I talk to Amy Robertson otherwise known as the wolf and the wild thing they are wedding and branding photographer based in Folkston today we talk about how to use Photography in your activism and building a community and we
also talk about Amy's New Found Love for sematic practice and sematic therapy uh so stick around and listen to the podcast Amy Robertson welcome to the podcast uh very nice to have you on thank you very much for joining us just after New Year um before we begin um people might know you uh was your online presence uh wolf and wolf and the wild thing but they might have known you before as uh the woman and the Wolf that's correct right yeah yeah so um let's begin by talking a little bit about you
your background how you got into first photography wedding photography portraiture and then more into kind of what's happening now so give us a little bit of an overview ah overview um I'm not very good at summarizing um but hello Tom thanks for having um so um I have been a photographer for this will be my 14th year um so I started in 2010 um my uh first um kind of uh interactions with photography I guess was when I was doing ski Seasons um and I really enjoyed photographing Landscapes but als
o extreme sports um not very well um I was genuinely a pretty bad photographer in the beginning um um and I yeah I just really enjoyed it and then when I stopped doing ski Seasons I moved to London um with I don't know very loose Ambitions to be a photographer but not really knowing how I was going to kind of get into it um and I was actually an oair and worked in bars and and things like that for the first couple of years that I was I was in the city um I would probably say that it wasn't until
I started to have some form of mentorship or or engage with the photography community that I really started to improve and also learn how to run a business and how to do marketing because I was pretty terrible at all of those things but I also feel like back then everything was a lot harder because you didn't have things like Squarespace or WordPress and you had to like code a website to build it there wasn't any kind of the learning tools that you have on YouTube the cameras were also a lot mo
re challenging to use so it was actually a long longer progression to become quite good at what you were doing um but yeah went full-time in 2015 um so coming up to 10 years full time um and most of my work has been within weddings um and I then kind of started to go into brand photography uh because that started to become quite big over here the Americans kind of coined it first but obviously with everyone becoming some sort of a brand online um more and more people wanted content and so like p
rofessional kind of Lifestyle imagery um really started to have its its boom um and I launched the woman and the Wolf in 2017 um and yeah built that and my wedding photography like up to six figures post pandemic started to do more education mentoring myself um and build more of an audience um and then in the last 12 months I've basically completely deconstructed my business and my life um because um all of that success made me really miserable and lonely and burnt out um and I use the word succ
ess because that's like culturally that's success right getting a business to six figures and looking like you know everything um and having people want you to speak and or interview you or or things like that so um but like inside of really wasn't very happy at all and i' just been diagnosed with autism as well in 2022 so I think that also was kind of a catalyst for going this is not what I want and it's not the right fit for me um I also realized this well in 2023 because we're now in 2024 tha
t I was nonbinary um and so having a gendered business um suddenly really didn't fit at all so yeah and 2023 was very much a deconstruction um and I'm currently retraining as a traum informed sematic counselor um so yeah I'm very multi-passionate I will still be a photographer but I will still want to be a therapist um and yeah and that's not even touching on Snap which is my other business as well so that it's quite difficult to summarize I think yeah of course I mean we I think we started chat
ting maybe kind of sort of spring early summer of the of 2023 so I've sort of seen the deconstruction and the sort of beginnings of the Reconstruction I suppose um but I didn't know you before then so it's obviously and I think I think it's very possible that I might have heard you being interviewed on a podcast from about a year ago which was probably just as you were hitting that kind of six figure like like you say the markers of success uh you were just starting to get to that kind of place
where it's like right I you know I'm I'm being successful this that my brand is is is is where I want it to be and then you kind of just it's almost like you just went noge you had this massive shift and I kind of met you at the tail end of those kinds of sets of realizations I suppose and we've been chatting and hanging out a little bit since then um what's what's kind of could you say instigated that shift I mean I know you mentioned autism your realization about being non-binary but those see
m to have come possibly in the midst of the shift do you think rather than at the beginning is there something that triggered it um the burnout or I am a uh Survivor of abuse and complex trauma um I have a very complicated history and um I I probably say it started in 2018 when I left my ex partner um and was homeless for a year um and that was like a uh kind of I'm going to keep repeating these patterns unless I I choose to work out why I'm doing them um and I was very different human then um a
nd obviously kind of starting the therapeutic Journey um and then working out that I was autistic there this just kind of over the last five years well nearly six years now kind of uh this process of trying to stand on my own two feet I think a lot of my financial success being six figures and the success of my business was actually coming from a uh trauma wound for survival um so that kind of constantly saying yes to absolutely everything um kind of wanting to validate myself to um not ever wan
t to be in the position again where I have to be homeless like a lot of it was from Fear um and then like this last 12 months has been a like there is so much more to life and me than this um and I really want to get to know who that person is as well as kind of continuing on that journey of like of of healing you know 35 plus years of um quite big complex challenges so yeah I can't say it's one specific thing just uh I was going to kill myself with the exhaustion and the burnout and make myself
very poly if I didn't make some sort of a change yeah of course and you've made some quite radical changes you also moved so you are now by the sea in a beautiful little town tell us more about folon uh I love Folton um came here completely by accident it was um 2022 I was kind of wanting to leave London um early 2022 and I was actually going to move uh to like the Sheffield or Manchester kind of peak Peak District area cuz I have friends up there um but I couldn't find anywhere where my horse
could go um that was suitable for like the lifestyle that she's enjoyed for many years um and I kind of put it on a back burner and then someone mentioned Folton um and my first thought was I could not afford this quite shocked um they're not as cheap as what they were in 2022 but they're still really reasonable um and it had a really fast connection to London but I just didn't realize I think when I moved here it was to kind of get out of London to be able to have my own space to not have to ho
use share anymore um to be by the Sea and to also be closer to my horse and I haven't anticipated the experience that I've had here of like Community the creative Community here is is huge the sea swimming community is huge um but there is just everyone here seems to be in like this mindset of like just looking after each other um it's yeah I had an I've had an absolutely amazing 12 months getting to know the people who live here um and for me because I spent my entire life moving like from diff
erent countries at one point I wasn't staying somewhere more than six months I wasn't making any form of like meaningful connections or relationships so to be somewhere where I like can see myself growing old and really settling um it's really nice um so yeah folon has been um like probably one of the best choices I made in the last couple of years amazing um one of the things I noticed from your Instagram I obviously you've got lots of really beautiful work there uh you know but peppered amongs
t that beautiful work is um like posts about yourself and about the kind of connections that you want to make like maybe they're text posts they kind of carousels um and increasingly now you use Instagram stories to talk to the people that are following you and you really use this as an opportunity to connect with people and I think that we often in especially within photography the photography world we talk about the importance of community and we talk about the importance of building connectio
ns and so forth but you really seem to have taken that very seriously and it's not just in a sense that you're trying to show good work you know you're you're obviously showing you know the wedding work that you do and The Branding work that you do but also importantly I think that you're actually taking the idea of community really seriously now that's obviously important to you personally but it seems also important to you with the other business that you run that you mentioned very briefly wh
ich is snap so do you want to give us a little bit of a rundown of what snap is all about um so snap was I still don't know whether it was a good decision or a bad decision but it was a decision and it was right at the time um I bought the company in 20 it was already kind of established as a conference for uh wedding photographers um and um I bought it from it previous owner Laura bab um because she no longer wanted to run it but obviously kind of wanted to kind of continue that on um and my fr
iend Rosie uh also decided to come into it as well so she's my business partner um and we had a really big Journey with it uh again we've had to deconstruct that as well because there's this whole thing of taking over someone else's brand right which is um complex um because you kind of want to continue their business model and then you work out that that's not right for you so you kind of start changing things and also yeah the community aspect um I feel like the photography industry um and our
long-term plan for SNAP is to take it out of the photography industry and expand it into the creative Community as like a whole um because as we've kind of grown with it over the last kind of two to three years um and Rosie is not a photographer she's a musician as well um we have found that the photography industry has been too small like it has felt too small and too restrictive over what we want to bring to people and how we want to connect people and yeah the community side we had our first
big conference this keep saying this year but it's not now I in about week I will I will stop saying this year but last year we had our first big conference in the Peak District and it was the first time I've ever witnessed on a big scale authentic connection and safety like a container for people to be able to really be authentic and be themselves and know that they're safe when they're held in that space and I'm I just feel like we need more and more communities like genuine communities not c
ommunities where like the motivation is to make like as much money as possible possible um like communities outside of capitalism um and and and as well with s we really aim to give a platform to people uh to really diverse voices people from lots of different backgrounds um and who have so much value to give just from their stories um as well as obviously helping people to kind of build businesses and feel less alone because I think when you work for yourself and you run a small business it's r
eally lonely and it's really hard um so kind of having a genuine Community around you I think is just really powerful and really important um and and yeah we also have activism at the heart of what we do as well um like I as artists as creatives um and as small businesses we are political whether we are choosing to be or not um and I think there's there so much power there when when you when you build genuine Community not like the the types I've been in a lot of different spaces over the years
and there's always this pedestal culture where the people who run it are like everyone wants to be their friend it's like a popularity contest there's like a clickiness to it um and instead of the community being able to be safe the culture is defended at all costs and and and I think that's really dangerous so that's also something that we really focus on with with SNAP is um creating safe learning environments for everyone not not just uh the kind of core clickiness I guess I can't really find
the right words for it I've I've not been to a snap but I've uh seen you guys doing your thing from a from a distance um and I think that in in a way what you've done over the last year maybe two years is really bring in line you know what your interests are and what your commitments are your political commitments your social commitments and The Business of running snap and I've seen that more and more that the the voice that snap is speaking in is much more aligned to the things that you've be
en doing which I think is you know an achievement that we could all be you know sort of striving towards is is having that kind of alignment between our own voice and the and the and the businesses that we run it's easier if you're just a one person band right in a sense that you know you can do that for yourself but doing that for a company that you've literally taken from somebody else and tried to reinvent that's also got some somebody else and lots of other stakeholders involved because ever
ybody who speaks at the conference who goes to the conference they will have a kind of idea of what snap is bringing that into alignment with the voice that you want to speak in is actually fantastic I think that that's really good you know you spoke very briefly about kind of marketing in a sense it's kind of a bit like marketing right it's a it's a it's a kind of very effective way of marketing what you do precisely because you know that that actually filters out the types of people that you m
ight not want to come to that space because like you say you talk about safety and not having a kind of you don't want to have like a strong like um let's say a kind of uh a wall around this space but you do want to promote the types of people that would be would want to feel safe in those sorts of spaces so being able to speak in a certain voice is really that's kind of the the mechanism by which you you You' do that um and it does feel very much like that now especially the kind of ways that y
ou speak online um you know I think I got uh I saved one of your posts this orn one of snaps posts this morning that's about journaling prompts and I was like oh those are some really good questions to be asking myself um and I think in a way what you're trying to do more than anything is teach people how to do what you do that's what it feels like you know outside of just the conference the kind of way that snap operates as a space online to kind of engage with it's like how do you teach that k
ind of um I keep using the word alignment and I I'm not sure whether authenticity is the right word but you know something close to something like that would you say that that's kind of accurate um I think that's what I used to do like yeah like uh the kind of I don't want to teach people what I do I want to help teach them tools to be able to make their own decisions from like their own place because um yeah like I feel it's it's challenging right like because with wolf and wild thing that can
be all me like that can be and and that's in such an interesting place at the moment cuz I can't earn any money until May 2024 because of the vat threshold which I refused to go over again um so at the minute that's kind of like this weird space where I'm just kind of filling it um and I don't have a plan for it at the moment um and I'm kind of okay with that weirdly um with as you said with snap it's very different I have a bigger Community to think of I have attendees I have speakers I have my
business partner and also they kind what our brand values are and what we want to kind of put out into the world and what we want to create and yeah I kind of just feel like I want to give people tools to like think for themselves rather than be like oh everyone's marketing this way so I will Market this way because that doesn't really work that you're gonna like you're you're either going to not be able to be consistent because it's not like aligned with who you are or you're uh going to get t
he wrong type of clients because you're mimicking what some someone else is doing um so yeah I think I always just want to try and help people find their own voice and take up space in a way that is genuine to them and I know authenticity is like a big buzz word and it's overused all the time um but yeah you know it's it's been challenging for the last year because I've exited hustle culture when I was fully like marketing hustle culture before so I think my audience on both sides is a bit like
what what's going on and that's the thing right we can be fluid we can change like there's no fixed destination I think this is kind of the biggest thing I want to say to people is like there is no fixed destination you don't need to be any one thing you can change your mind at any point um and and I think that's kind of what the we we want to encourage at snap is this and it's a very neurodivergent way of being being multi-passionate um and and I think that's probably our community but also I I
view it as a form of activism because I really believe that Community slower living more sustainable um goals like more connecting with yourself and other people I really do believe that that helps on like the bigger kind of impact of of of the world um and and where we're at at the minute so um yeah I I've kind of at the minute just trying to navigate my uh transitions or transformation over the last 12 months and how I bring that into my Brands it's it's actually quite hard because um you mad
e money the old way um and um it's it's it's not always the easy path to kind of not be spouting out stuff that that isn't helpful absolutely you mentioned activism and I want to talk a little bit about that one of the questions I wanted to ask you about was the kind of using photography for activist purposes um we both work in kind of what could be considered commercial photography settings yeah so the relationship between commercial photography and our politics is sometimes fraud you seem to t
read a line very well because by the way that you speak speak your tone of voice it attracts certain types of people to your business um how do you how do you manage that I mean like you say you know you were one person and now you're becoming a different person so there are parts of your audience that are probably somewhat confused if not shocked but how do you um how do you manage that like what's the relationship between photography and activism on a broad sense to you um so I think you can l
ike go back a really basic thing um with photographers like we're visual artists right um I very much feel that photographers have a social responsibility to show diversity through their work um and to dismantle beauty standards um I wholeheartedly believe that um because I wholeheartedly believe that every single person um regardless of what type of body they have deserves to be seen and to take up space and and to have value in the world and to be valued and I will never forget uh wedding phot
ographer I had some very brief mentoring with when he told me that um he only booked Brides who are under a size 12 um and he would never show anyone on his portfolio who is over a size 12 and I just found that like I I really really really believe that that how how we represent people is so important so I think that just as for phography on its own that that is a form of activism if you can participate in making the world um more diverse and beautiful um rather than adhering to kind of capitali
st patriarchal beauty standards that um yeah just well yeah I and that even with the woman and the wolf that was right from the very beginning um I always had I always worked with so many different types of people um and um like I always say there's no such thing as photogenic um there just isn't um but there is and and way this kind of like ties into the type of therapy I'm going to go into a bit like the more embodied you are when you're being photographed the better like the more of you kind
of comes through the more comfortable you look the more at ease you look the more the more yourself you look so always looking I've always been promoting that so in in that sense it has always been activism um you know I wrote um like pre realizing I was nonbinary obviously writing from quite a gendered perspective um and in in I mean again like I can pull this apart for hours which I won't but you know writing um I've always written and I've always written blog posts I remember one I I think it
was was I don't know if I can swear but it was a poo a complete load of modesty was like constructed to keep people small and to stop them asking for what they wanted or to claim space so activism has always been there um and you know when I left my ex well I was really involved with um I walked this for for Charities that gave free counseling to people who came out of abusive Rel ship um like I it it it has always been in me to want like to to want to have a better impact to do better um and t
hat that's also the work that I do myself right dismantling the oppressive structures that are inside me and I just I want to live in an easier world like a less harmful world like I don't think that will happen in my lifetime um but I want to move through the world causing as little harm as possible um and that reflects in my businesses um and how I work with people not perfectly but also perfect as and just being human like I think like the word activism I feel uncomfortable with because I thi
nk activism is just being human like and being in community and and caring about how you might be causing harm to other people or you might not be causing harm or how you work with other people how you make other people feel and I feel like as a business that's at the core of what we do right because I don't know I've heard it plenty of times before going back to photography where I've had clients who said that they really loved the photos that they had taken on previous shoots with other photog
raphers but that photographer made them feel like like and to achieve those photos like how do you make people feel and I I just think it's all so intrinsically entwined together that it's that it's un unavoidable it's absolute chaos like I feel like most of the time like there is zero structure to anything that I do because I'm constantly um kind of moving through whatever's kind of happening um and and and that obviously comes with its challenges as well but yeah I I just feel I I shared a pos
t the other day which was like we don't need activists we just need people to be human and to see other people as human beings and to want them to have the same safety and rights um and opportunities that that that we have so yeah um I do worry that I'm becoming a bit extreme though sometimes it becomes harder and harder to to fit in um with every kind of shedding I think is is is what I've been going through um but yeah we'll see where we'll see where it takes me don't worry I mean in my academ
ic world I'm very much in in uh I guess kind of adjacent spaces to radical activist spaces so no there's there's you can you can go a lot further before you become extreme that's for sure that's good I want to go further like I don't what the point of having a platform and having an audience if you're not making if you're not having an impact and you're not using that if you're not using that to make the change you want to see in the world I hate using the word good or bad like I really find tho
se words quite like because we're all both right it's both and um and yeah um I think yeah I'm very much uh and and you obviously follow me someone who doesn't do the Highlight whe um I think that's like a another way of kind of working against the system but also being open and honest and sharing the good and the bad and um yeah on the most part I feel that that's helpful for people um our stories are really powerful absolutely I think that's I think that actually it's stories that we tell that
are going to be the most um impactful and you know certainly the the story of the last year for you is has been and it's actually really fantastic that we've got a you know had a conversation now the very beginning of a new year and last year being the kind of big transformation year for you so you can actually look back at it in some way and kind of you know piece it together as part of a narrative part of the story which actually becomes very helpful for people that you're speaking to um whic
h brings me on to talk about the next stage in your life which is the sematic healing aspect of your of your work and we spoken a little bit before about how you want to combine photography and the therapy stuff so tell me more about that um I have always been interested in this field I attempted to do psychology for a levels um but being well I didn't know I was autistic then but being autistic I did not function very well in the education system at all um so it's kind of always been there I've
always read books about it um I've always had an interest in why things happen why we behave certain ways like it's just kind of an endless curiosity really um and then obviously coming out of my um the relationship that I was in in 2018 um I needed to have therapy quite badly um so I kind of went in I had two therapists both were kind of cognitive so top top down um and um I could rationalize to people the days about why I behaved the way I behaved or why I was avoidant or why I always felt an
Impulse to run away um or found myself um attracted to unavailable harmful people like I could I could tell you everything um I was very rational very logical but I could not cry I could not express emotions um and it just didn't it just it was like I had no access from here below like I didn't know like I could one of the things I've experienced in the last 12 months is chronic pain um and I've before last year where I wasn't kind of trying to connect with my body as much as possible um you kn
ow I ran a marathon I did a lot of long distance walking I could work for days and weeks and weeks on end um because I just was ignoring everything that was happening here and there comes a point where you kind of don't feel anything you don't feel anything at all because you've shut it off you've ignored it so much and you're in the kind of freeze collapse response of your nervous system um and yeah I started I did three month month work with a sematic coach last spring um and then I walked to
the West Highland Way um and then I did psychedelic mushrooms um and I'm not suggesting this to anyone but there was kind of like a period of things that happened and then I could feel things again um and I could cry and it and I could uh feel emotions in my body like I could have a reaction which is what was not happening before because of the like shutdown and I just started to explore more and more of the Statics and like the work of gabble mate uh really opened opened me up to this idea that
our our bodies are this really incredible place of intelligence um and we get cut off from them at at a really young age like it's where our intuition is um it's our feeling body it's what tells you when you know this isn't a person to be around or this is not the right situation or this is not the right person to work with or to tune into how other people are feeling but at the same time not be telling yourself the story that their uh withdrawal or um disconnect is because you've done somethin
g wrong so it's kind of like that returning to self um and and we store trauma in our bodies as well it's not in our people with PTSD complex childood trauma and things like that they they they yeah so kind of just started on this very big Journey um and uh committed to a lot of yoga uh which has helped massively uh sea swimming being in nature as much as possible um and I had already felt like my photography career was coming to an end and it was making me miserable because I didn't know what e
lse I could do like I didn't want to go to university for six years um and I also didn't want to do psychology either because I didn't want to be a clinician like I wanted to work with people in a more healing way and so I guess healer is probably the right word and I think it was like middle of the summer um someone introduced me to the International School of holistic healing um and they had a yearlong uh well it's 18 months because of the um supervised work that you have to do um fully accred
ited uh course to become a trauma informed sematic counselor um and it was just like instant yes this is exactly what I meant to be doing um and I'm two months in and it's exhausting um and really confronting because obviously we're like covering these big topics like dysfunctional families and ADV adverse childhood experiences and poly vagal Theory there's all these like things and it's all this new information but I'm also seeing myself and my own patterns within what I'm learning and um that
it it is quite the last couple of months have been very confronting with this kind of taking on of new information um but I'm just really excited about this journey and also how it will play out for me as a photographer um because I feel like photography is always a kind of form of therapy in a way because you're dealing with people who feel quite vulnerable um and you're hoping to give them some confidence and feel better about themselves so I think having these these skills around um embodimen
t and sematics will really help actually make me a better photographer as well and the has made me like my photography again I think uh which quite nice so I could talk about it for hours it's fasc it's just yeah human beings are amazing um but we have yeah it's it's going to be a good good fun Journey absolutely I mean in in many ways photography is that is that thing where it's this kind of combination of both the body and the mind right it's that kind of you know you are very much involved wi
th your body when you're on a shoot you're moving you're you're sensing you're feeling in a way that is is not cognitive it's you know once you kind of got over the where do I put the lights or where do I position the person kind of set of like not rules but sort of ways of of thinking about it it becomes very much a kind of a bodily felt thing doesn't it but then the other side of the business running the business is very much like you're on your computer you're editing you're emailing you're u
pdating your website so it's very much like you're kind of you know you you're suddenly back in the in the in the brain space of things um but I actually think that a lot of people recognize very much what you've just said about you know the needs to connect to your body but without maybe realizing it you know everyone goes to the gym everyone wants to go on a nice walk in nature everyone goes you know oh I can relax I can go for a swim and actually using their body as a kind of form of relaxati
on so in a way it's kind of part of who we are already it's just maybe the language isn't necessarily available for everyone to say oh actually this is a form of therapy this is actually a very helpful thing for us you know one of the things I love about being in the studio is that actually you're you know you're disconnected from your phone you're disconnected from a screen you're disconnected a little bit from your brain you're just in that kind of moment it's very um you know what someone mig
ht call a mindful state or a state of presence um and time just kind of flies and you you come to the end of the session like oh wow okay that was very quick uh so those sorts of things are very I think fundamental to the to the work that we do um and it's I I think I guess what your your role is moving into with somatic therapy is actually helping people understand that connection and understand that way that they can bring those sorts of things into their lives and maybe even into their busine
sses perhaps you know is that something that you think you'd you'd bring into maybe a kind of coaching role that You' take on yeah yeah definitely I really for the most part we heal trauma like everyone has trauma so like I just really want to like reiterate that everyone has trauma um and um a lot of us I know that I did even when I was my most successful so like even when everything looks like it's textbook exactly how it should be this is what Society rewards you for it was all responding fro
m a space of trauma and um like the more um and actually uh my friend Nadia wrote a really beautiful piece about this recently but the more I've healed the less ambitious I've become um and um the less material I've become the less I'm attached to how much money I have in my bank or how many sales I've made that month um the more present I am the more I'm actually enjoying my life um and when it comes to business I think a lot of people are making decisions from whatever trauma wounds they might
have um like whether that's to be more validated um whether that's to win more Awards um like whatever it is and it's they often achieve the things that they want to achieve and they're still not happy they're still unsatisfied they're still low they still feel like like they still hate themselves um and it's because they're not healing the the the kind of root of that um and and people will go through their entire lives completely unconscious of of this and actually it's maybe the people who h
ave had maybe more like bigger trauma who obviously go on to do this work that kind of um are leading the way with it but I think absolutely you can have I my business now like I know how much I I did this and this is a really good question for people to ask themselves but one of the things I did earlier in the year is I sat down and and I put this on the snap blog actually I I wanted I sat down and I asked myself what do I love about my everyday like because life isn't all big moments right mos
t of it is our everyday experiences and um I was like what do I love about that every day what makes my my everyday feel meaningful and like calm not even happy like happiness isn't even the goal just content calm um and it was all free stuff it was all sea swimming or like mostly free it was all sea swimming being able to go to yoga have a coffee with a friend have time to read have time to cook a meal and enjoy eating it slowly like to not be at my desk all the time um and when I really kind o
f looked into that I was like oh this is where I need to scale back everything needs to be scaled back because actually when I work out what I need financially it doesn't need to be this much like and all I'm doing is void filling I'm buying stuff I don't need like I've got rid of so much of that stuff um so yeah it's I I 100% think the kind of the the sematic work getting to know yourself shedding those like beliefs and uh because it is shedding um I WR about this as well last year like transfo
rmation isn't like an adding on it's a healing back um and getting to like who you are and what you really want um and and that's really big and scary and it's not easy but so yeah I feel like going forward like with coaching and things like what I want to do is help people taking that kind of trauma informed sematic work and bringing it into a type of business coaching where I'm actually helping people to understand first of all what they really want um because that's a big question um and who
they really are and um you do that by kind of healing our stuff basically um so yeah it's I think it's gonna be really interesting to see what I can put together and it feels like a really new creative process as well absolutely it reminds me um probably the happiest I've ever been has been times when I've had the least money you know I if there's one point in my life that I can think back to when I was the happiest it was kind of 20 4 to 2007 I was running a small Gallery in Brighton and we wer
e doing it on an absolute shoe string you know it was there was no money in it it wasn't as though it certainly wasn't a commercial Gallery it was a little space for us to you know put on some exhibitions make some art and we were doing it with you know 150 or something like that for an exhibition and genuinely those moments I look back and like that's when I've been the happiest you know I was on job Seekers allowance I you know had this little Gallery space I was working with my friends and we
were just having the greatest of times and I think that we probably always go back you know and actually nowadays the things that are making me happiest are exactly the things where I feel like that's the same spirit that I'm entering into those kinds of processes with so you know with the photography business it's like oh you know I am actually I you know I love the the process of doing it and yes of course there are financial goals at the end of it which help you kind of quantify where you ar
e and certainly help you pay the rent but it's um it's like oh how can I kind of you know figure this thing out or like work out the way that that might work better than this thing or like you know what can I do in that particular instance to create those sorts of arrangements and and and you know make my work better all those sorts of things so it is it is those things that really make me happiest I think so it's lovely to be able to kind of have that kind of realization that you know yeah look
financial goals are kind of part of it maybe but they certainly not the kind of driving force behind behind what we do um and actually maybe that's going to lead on to the the final question or of the well maybe the final question we'll see where we get to um you mentioned this and I think this is something that you know is a is a complex and somewhat difficult internal battle for a lot of people and certainly for for me is that kind of how do we combine our to put to put it to you know to use
the particular words um a kind of anti- capitalist stance within a kind of confines of a capitalist system so you know we run businesses that have got financial goals how do you combine those or kind of work out that complexity oh god um this is a big question um and one that I have been trying to answer for a little while now we live in a c you're right we live in a capitalist system and we have to survive it um so I kind of like that's kind of what I've been looking at is how can I survive the
system but then also how can I break it a little bit as well and I think that's the kind of key part um I know with as we move forward with um like Snap for example we obviously need to make money we haven't made any money we've lost a lot of money um but like it's a process um and events cost a lot of money so it's not like you just buy the cameras and then you're kind of a photographer we have a lot more but we really believe in in in what we're doing and where we're going and and and what we
want to do and plus we enjoy working together I really enjoy our community so there's like yeah we need to make some money but also we're really enjoying doing this and and what we're doing is good um but like there's things like accessibility I think can also help so like we um are experimenting more this year with like um we can't do it for our big conference because we need to we need to break even but like with our other offerings we're kind of looking at like a pay I pay what you can type
accessibility so like CU so many I I think it's probably d now but the whole like business culture was like you know look at me in my kind of six figure or five fig launches or or whatever and and that's amazing but like that's not sustainable like there's only so many times you can sell that course um and you are just selling that course to make money or not necessarily like it's um yeah the kind of like coaching industry I kind of feel like it's just coaching people teaching people how to be c
oaches and that's very it really is right is it's like the like LM MLM or like you know um it's just yeah the kind of like affiliate thing as well um this is great if that's for you but like I I I want my work to contribute to a better world and um the biggest thing has been the slowing down and looking at sustainability within my business is for myself so I don't break like and so I have the fluidity to change and evolve like you know as we talked about earlier like one of the biggest things ha
s been like the kind of almost sudden uturn for my audience and accepting that I'm going to lose a portion of that audience I'm going to have to rebuild from somewhere with the capitalis capitalism is like a a gripping it's like a holding on it's like it's very like materialistic it's very very um it's like based on you as an individual it's very individualistic but I think when you can kind of outside of that that's where you can like like okay I don't need to earn more than 85,000 like busines
s does not need to turn over more than that um this is my own personal businesses not snap snap does need to turn over more because purely because of the cost of what we're doing but um I need to turn over 85,000 and that is enough that is enough for me to do everything that I want to do because I sat down and worked out exactly what I want and I Stripped Away the kind of societal pressures of what that should be and actually thought about what I wanted um and most of it is you know is time um b
ut yeah 85,000 don't need to go over the back threshold and it's having that boundary of like okay that's £8,000 turnover a month for 10 months of the year because I don't want to work for two months of the year um and it's that slowing down because people seem to think you need to earn like six figures or seven figures in order to not have to work that much you don't you just need to not want the fluff like you can have the life you want on less money and then the beauty of that is so obviously
I'm like 1,500 away from the vat Threshold at the minute until May 2024 so I can't actually really earn any money for the next five months um and it's been like that since November and it's really interesting to see what happens when you're getting a lot of inquiries for stuff and you're like I can't say yes to this I have to say no there is a lot of stuff that comes up um but the beauty of that is the work that I've passed on to other people I've been able to be like I can't do this but my fri
end can I can't do this uh so I'm going to post it in the snap group and pass it on to someone else so then other people are doing well as well um and I think that's how you survive the system but also start to break it down a little bit because it's a mindset it's not um they want you to be thinking that there is not enough and you need to say yes to everything and you need to protect all of your resources rather than sharing resources um and I think that's the kind of switch and being like thi
s is what I need but after that I can share it with everyone else and like yeah I'm I'm sure there's lots of other ways that that that question can be answered um and I'm sure there's more um but that's kind of the answer that I kind of come to at at the minute yeah I think that we're all kind of battling with these various contradictions that inherent in who we are as people and inherence in the fact that we live in certain parts of the world and you know live under certain certain systems um a
nd it's very difficult to actually you know there certainly would be no demand for Purity I think you know having everything kind of completely figured out like you say the good the bad you know that kind of yeah division is is is probably not particularly helpful for us actually um but you know it it seems to me that you know you've found a route or you you're designing a route through this you know sort of this mess that is really beneficial to you because it can it can help you it can help yo
u you know live in a live a live a life that is genuine to who you want to be and and and I think that that's actually something that we should all be um you know hopefully able to do or you know at least kind of um you know working towards and and in a in a sense that's a little kind of little Act of resistance in a way on kind of personal level isn't it um but you know hopefully the way that you kind of then can help other people do the same things that's the kind of activist part of the of th
e project it seems you know you can do it for yourself it's not particularly activist but it's the it's the process of creating the the communities and the sort of mechanisms by sharing those kinds of um resources and the learning that you've you've done that actually creates those kinds of environments which will help people you know exactly and and and I think um to like a really I think we need to move at like we need to move out of this whole like self-care like s looking after yourself is r
eally important your well-being is really important but like you you have to then move into Collective and Community Care um like the world that that that is like what we need to be doing and the the more we're like focused on un I say unnecessary like the more we focus on the things that are probably not as important to us and I think the kind of big question I would I put people and what I ask myself regularly is how do I want to feel when I'm dying like when I'm at the end of my life like and
I'm looking back and I think actually Reckoning with your mortality on a regular basis is also a very powerful way of getting to the root of what you want um and and ultimately everyone wants the same thing everyone wants to feel connected everyone wants to feel a sense of belonging um everyone wants to um experience and give love like we want enough food and we want a roof over our heads um but the real Baseline of things like you just need to look at social media the reason people put out the
stuff that they do and the way that they do it and I do it too is because they want to connect and capitalism has put our value in our work and our productivity when actually we're entitled to all of those things regardless of of of of what that that is so yeah it's it's such a big big topic but I think when you really really get down to what you want and how and you then realize that it's it's it's not the superficial things that we've been told to strive for um and and suppos it's basically j
ust what's happened to me in the last 12 months and I'm just gone H great okay we'll start again yeah absolutely I think it's important right to to remember that actually capitalism is a particular type of system but you can actually still be participating in what is known as a market without it necessarily being a capitalist one so it is important to be able to hold on to that that you can actually sell a product or a service without it necessarily being sort of completely t by capitalism um an
d I think I think what's really interesting is that you mentioned self-care and you I've got a lot of problems with with the self-care kind of narrative um as well um and I always feel that self-care without solidarity is really like it's not politics at all it's just individualism um a lot of a lot of my teaching work is uh focused on kind of a critique of a critique of what looks like left leftist work I guess which is the kind of self care healing you know kind of communities that are are all
about like you know individualistic uh you know make yourself better positivity toxic positivity all of that kind of stuff so is really good to be able to finish with that yeah yeah and you know we look after each other like one of the biggest things people have a struggle with and I was the same is asking for help sure like asking for help is anti capitalist like like accepting that you're a human being and sometimes you need help and I have witnessed this a lot uh within my circles um and act
ually there one of the things I love about the folks in community is that when someone needs help everyone is there even if they don't know them um like the other day someone um who doesn't have a lot of money at the moment their laptop's broken and I think between like 10 like 10 people we might manag to like solve it um like you know it's it's it's just this I think that is the first probably one of the first steps for people is like being like rather than pretending that you've got it all tog
ether you know occasionally and publicly asking for help um and being a bit vulnerable and then also be willing to help other people um yeah I think there's just so many ways and and I like what you said about like participating in certain markets like I haven't bought anything from Amazon for a year um I have committed myself to spending my money with small businesses um and um I'm very fortunate that we have a lot of choice where I live but say yeah so I think like that's like little things li
ke that as well I think are really that you can take part in your own kind of little ethic ethically capitalistic markets I guess in a way um so yeah it's uh could talk about it for hours hours and hours we will do on another another another time um so just to wrap up I you're a big reader uh you're always posting posting book recommendations so give us one what are you reading at the moment or have read recently that you think people should be reading uh so there's two books that I'm reading at
the moment that I would really massively recommend uh one is care work um disability Justice um let me get it one second or I can't find it it's not here umw work um I can't remember her name it's Leah something but if you look up care work uh disability Justice the book will come up um it's written by black um or people of color disbled people queer people um and um like the essays in there about building accessible communities and structures that include everyone um is probably one of the mos
t vital books that I I have read in a really long time another one I'm reading at the moment is my grandmother's hands um which uh by resar manam um I hope I pronounced that right uh it's about racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and our bodies and um the way he takes the sematic work and applies to uh generational trauma and racialized Trauma um is just incredibly powerful um and yeah that's that's two book I me I think I could reel off like 20 bit I'm sure I'm sure people w
ill just have to follow you on Instagram to get your book recommendations I'm putting together my end of year which is going to have all my book recommendations from the last 12 months um yeah reading is powerful um I I my commitment this year one of is to far less time on my phone um and more time reading books um because yeah my phone really irritates me yeah again that's another thing to navigate absolutely absolutely Amy it's been an absolute pleasure um where can people find you um so you c
an find me for kind of my portraiture and what will'll eventually be coaching and therapeutic stuff uh the wolf and the Wild thing on Instagram um Amy Robertson photographer if you're interested in weddings um and then snap snap photoest uh for kind of snap and all of that stuff um but they were all kind of cross-pollinated so if you find one you'll you'll find the others yeah fantastic well thank you very much for joining me today me thank you for having me it's been nice to [Music] chat [Music
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