Even at home I never felt truly at home, never truly at ease. Most of my life had been a battle with a constant feeling of emptiness, of feeling lost. Twenty years old me had enough of this at last. Something had to be done, had to change. I had to change. So a dear friend and I did the sensible thing - we decided to get as far away as possible. We left everything behind and set foot on New Zealand. And what happened there truly changed everything.

The landscapes were so overwhelming, so massive and raw and alive, that they stopped me in my tracks. I'd always struggled with anxiety, with irrational fears, always felt somewhat incomplete. But standing on top of a quiet mountain peak, surrounded by all that nature, everything just... paused.

I felt this stillness I'd never experienced before. A clarity. A spark.

Nature cracked something open in me. Life got simpler, slower. The constant noise in my head quieted down, and I felt so damn alive that I picked up my camera. Not just to capture what I saw, but to hold onto what I felt. The calm. The awe. The freedom. The aliveness.

That's when photography became my way of understanding the world outside. And my language of expressing the one within.