Welcome to A True Life Built
Welcome to A True Life Built
This is for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again.
A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life.
As a society, we mark many traditional milestones but don’t often celebrate the courage it takes to make a change. So I’m documenting my messy, joyful, painful process of transformation.
How It Begins
This story begins with an ending: after 17 years in a complicated relationship, I finally left. In 2020, as Covid closed in, I packed a single suitcase and got on a plane. I left behind a marriage, a home and a country, but I gained the chance to begin again.
During the crucible of divorce, I bought an old camera at a flea market. In those early days, my emotions were too molten to handle so I poured them out on film.
Three years on, the chaos has cooled. I can finally look directly at my experiences and set them into words. A new self is forming by the day, sometimes by the hour, like lava meeting the steaming sea. It’s exhilarating and exhausting, this process of rebirth.
As nature has always known, an eruption is not just an end but also a beginning.
What I Write About
I am exploring the edges of my new life. It’s about grief and loss, yes—and it’s also about joy, about the quiet everyday beauty of life lived in tune with my own energy.
This is a love letter to sunflowers and early morning stillness, to art and friends keeping me company in this time of change. It’s about shedding the ways I kept myself small and claiming my art and my life for my own.
In the single suitcase I carried from my old life to my new, I packed a single book: Upstream, by Mary Oliver, with the passage that lends this project its name:
“And now… that first world, that old house, is lost and sold, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold—but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built…
I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And I can do what I want with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”
About Liz
Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.