The Photos That Changed How I See Myself

I posted pictures earlier this summer I was cautiously pleased with… and something shifted.

On a rainy day in June, I dragged an old crate out of my closet and dumped it onto my living room floor. It opened into a colorful scatter of my life—play programs, photo shoots, class certificates, behind-the-scenes snapshots from creative adventures that felt like they belonged to someone else.

Kneeling there, I felt warmth in my chest—and noise in my head.

I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to quiet it.

As I sifted through the pile, my fingers caught on a set of black-and-white photographs. I stopped.
​
They took my breath away.
My eyes softened. Holy hell.

Leigh Kiernan | Photographer

​I slipped backward into the time they were taken.

Early twenties. New town. Two toddlers. Single parenting. Almost no support system. I didn’t have language for boundaries or a stable sense of self yet. I absorbed everything... offhand comments, projections, quiet judgments... and turned them inward.

There was also this strange assumption from the outside: if I looked a certain way, then I must be confident, fine, untouched by struggle.

I wasn’t.

The way I appeared and the way I felt did not match.

I tried to explain that gap to people—sometimes to those who cared, sometimes just to anyone who asked. Most responses went nowhere. So I kept searching, but without tools, I defaulted to whatever voices were loudest around me.

And too often, those were the ones that diminished me.

Looking back, it’s not surprising the modeling I explored didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t know how to stand inside myself, let alone support what I was building.

Sitting on the floor years later, those same images in my hands, something began to shift.

Because the woman in those photos?

She didn’t look unsure.
She looked direct. Present. In control of her space.
She looked like someone who already had something.

And I couldn’t reconcile that with the story I had been telling myself about her.

About me.

Emotion rose fast—hot, disorienting, undeniable.

I started to see her from the outside.  And at the same time, I could feel everything she didn’t know yet.

She didn’t know she would go on to act in dozens of stage productions, work in film, train in different cities, or keep showing up creatively in new ways.

She didn’t know she would build a life through heartbreak, raise her children, navigate loss, or keep going through moments that would bring her to her knees—and still get back up.

She didn’t know how much resilience she carried.

Or that it would shape her into someone stronger, clearer, and more grounded in her spirit.

And maybe most of all--
   she didn’t know that the story she believed about herself wasn’t the truth.

At some point in that moment, sitting on the floor, I realized:  I had been hiding from my own evidence.

I hide myself… from me.

Leigh Kiernan | Photographer

That realization didn’t feel gentle. It felt confronting. But it also felt clean.

Because if I was the one doing the hiding, then I could also stop the hiding.

In the months leading up to that quiet rainy day, I had already been doing deeper internal work... trying to take more ownership of my path, my voice, my craft. Something in me knew I was ready for a different level of honesty with myself.

Those photos met me there.

They didn’t ask for explanation. They didn’t negotiate. They simply showed me what was already true.

Connection—with others, with our work, with our lives—is rarely neat.

The connection we have with ourselves is no different.

I’ve spent years trying to organize it, make it make sense, tie it up cleanly. It doesn’t work like that.

For me, vulnerability isn’t polished. It’s uneven, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes quiet, sometimes strong. It asks me to look directly at myself —without editing.

And in that crate, in those photos, I saw something I hadn’t fully allowed before:

evidence of effort
evidence of courage
evidence of someone who kept going

For a moment, I let myself feel it.
And then—I almost dismissed it.
That old pattern.
See it. Minimize it. Move on.

But this time, I caught it.
Instead, I stayed.

I let myself acknowledge something simple and, for me, hard-earned:  I was brave.

Not because everything worked. Not because I had it figured out.

But because I started. Because I kept going. Because I continued to move toward something I didn’t fully understand yet.

That matters.

More than I’ve ever allowed it to.

There’s a quiet shift that happens when you begin to change the way you speak to yourself.  Not in a forced or performative way...  but in a way that actually lands.

For a long time, my internal narrative was shaped by fear—fear of being misunderstood, criticized, dismissed. And in response, I learned to downplay myself before anyone else could.

To question what was good. To hesitate where I could have stood.

But those patterns aren’t permanent.

They can be seen. And they can be changed.

I don’t have a perfect formula for that.

What I do know is this:
  when I stop outsourcing the authority over my own story--
  and begin to take responsibility for how I see myself--
  something steadies.

There are still moments where I want reassurance, where I look outside myself for confirmation that I’m on the right path.

And I’m grateful for the people in my life who offer support, perspective, and care.  That matters too.

But what those photos gave me was something different.

They gave me proof.

Proof that I had already been showing up.
Proof that I had already begun.
Proof that there was something real there—long before I knew how to name it.

And that changes how I move forward.

I used to wait.

For clarity.
For permission.
For someone to reflect back to me that I was enough.

Now, I understand something more grounded: that sense of enough doesn’t arrive from the outside.

It begins the moment I decide to stand inside what’s already here.

No more explanation needed.