I am in Stockholm in a dark, cluttered loft apartment lying on a retro-style leather couch wrapped in my sleeping bag. Marcus, my host's cat, is carrying half a chicken carcass around the room in his mouth, proud, as if he had just killed it in an epic battle. Despite the fact that my friend's name is on the lease, it's obvious that Marcus owns this apartment — and he makes sure I know it, too, by waking me up in the middle of the night trying to claw my nose off of my face.
I am exhausted, have no idea what time it is, my sleeping schedule is officially wrecked and the cat just finished the last of the remaining food.
My host, Severus Tennenbaum, is a local photographer who specializes in celebrity portraits. We have been in touch by e-mail for several years and her couch has become my home for the past few days.. I came here to visit her and another photographer friend, Asim Rafiqui. Since booking my trip my schedule has filled up with interviews for local TV stations, radio stations and print publications. I am also meeting with a local publishing house in hopes of getting a book out before I become grey and senile.
Stockholm in December is not a terribly pleasant place, which fits in quite well with the way I travel. I never seem to make it anywhere at the ideal time — Baghdad in the summer when it is so hot you fill your boots with sweat, Sweden in the winter where it is so cold you wish you could sweat. I realize that if I were a bit better at planning my life would probably be much more pleasant. The sun goes down here at 2:30 p.m. I am not really sure there is actually a sun here, but people have told me that behind the 20 layers of clouds they believe it's still there. It doesn't seem to do much for people's sanity to live in this kind of environment for any length of time.
As if the lack of sun and national state of depression were not enough, there is a terrible sickness that strikes a great deal of Swedes this time of year that apparently makes them vomit uncontrollably for several days straight. Puking in frigid darkness is about as far from my idea of pleasant as you can get! I suppose the cat would be clawing at me while I was sick, just to make matters worse.
Stockholm is my first of a few European stops I am making on my way to work on several projects in Africa. I don't feel much like myself these days — a bit like I am running from life instead of living it. This past year has been difficult. Work takes up 15 or more hours a day, six or seven days a week and funding my projects takes an immense amount of time and is a terrible distraction from actually being in the field capturing images. My close call with the Iraq suicide bombing in Anbar was followed by two more, one in Gaza and another in the West Bank. I lost someone very dear to me this fall and feel like I must re-learn how to think and breathe in the absence of their support.
Photojournalism has been an incredible journey for me, a key that has unlocked a wealth of experiences and allowed me to meet countless outstanding human beings from Nobel Prize winners to people who have nothing in life but their incredible spirit. It has allowed me to witness the extremes on the emotional spectrum of life — from pain to joy, tedium to excitement. It has taught me more lessons than I could have learned in any school or in the pages of any book. It also has taken its toll. I often feel like a ghost, like I pass through people's lives and experiences before melting away. Sometimes I feel like I have dedicated so much of myself to living everyone else's life that I have forgotten how to live my own.
Or maybe I am just feeling low because of Sweden's bloody rain and darkness...
