NOT THAT KIND OF STRONG.

One day in 9th grade, we were doing the mile-run fitness test. One of the tests I dreaded the most, because by then I'd done it enough times to know I wasn't a good runner. I was always one of the ones who finished last. I just didn't want to be the very last one.

My class was full of athletes — soccer players, football players, tennis players — each one built for this. There were some other students like me who weren't athletically inclined either, which gave me some comfort.

I was talking to a friend before the whistle — he was on the football team — and he encouraged me. Told me I could run the mile in a decent time. Just keep up with me. For a split second, I actually felt like I could do it.

The teacher blew the whistle. My friend darted ahead of me. I remember thinking, what the heck, that's too fast!! — but he was a football player, and I was an artist. So I talked myself out of trying to keep up. I can't do it. It's too fast. I won't be able to keep up.

I don't remember my time. I was one of the last ones to finish. I took a lot of walking breaks. But at least I wasn't the very last.

That field wasn't the first place I learned to measure myself against other bodies. It wasn't even the first place I learned there was another way to stand in front of a crowd entirely.

First grade. The dress was light pink and silky, a layer of tulle over the skirt that reached down to my ankles, tiny pink roses lining the waist. I loved that dress.

I don't remember the song anymore, but I remember what it felt like to hold the microphone and sing into it — my voice echoing out from the speaker. Every day, while the other kids went outside for gym class, a teacher would send me to my sister's classroom to rehearse. It felt special to be pulled out of gym class to go do something else in general. But it felt even more special because I got to spend that time with my sister, doing something we both thought was fun.

The show was held in the school cafeteria, chairs set up in rows facing the stage. Each student in my sister's class wore something representing their culture, and — for reasons I can't fully explain even now — sunglasses, holding a stuffed animal. Endearingly random in hindsight. My sister and I wore matching pink dresses and matching pink sunglasses, standing at the center of the stage with our microphones.

My whole family was there — aunts, uncles, grandma, cousins. I remember hearing our own voices through the speakers, little and cute and about as on pitch as two little girls who'd rehearsed for weeks could manage. And the applause at the end.

I wasn't nervous. My sister was right there beside me, and my family had only come to cheer us on.

Two rooms, two versions of me. One where I was always finishing last. One where there was no race at all. Just my sister's hand near mine, and an audience that came only to watch, not to rank.

It wasn't that I was too slow, or too soft, or falling behind. I was just in a room that rewarded a narrow kind of strength — speed, toughness, obedience to a clock I never agreed to.

Their world didn't approve of someone like me. But here's what I know to be true: the same attentiveness they punished is what lets beauty find me, instead of rushing past it the way they wanted me to.

It would take me until I was standing alone on a hillside in Italy, years later, to feel that truth in my body instead of just knowing it in my head.

The path veers off the main piazza in Fiesole — Piazza Mino — behind the Duomo di San Romolo, up past the Convento di San Francesco. A stone road winding up the hillside. The hike only takes ten or fifteen minutes, but it felt much longer than that. The path was wide, but the steepness was intense — my calves were burning within thirty seconds. I huffed and puffed, no joke.

Good thing I was alone. I didn't have to feel bad about slowing anyone down while I stopped to catch my breath, more than once. But I was chasing a sunset, and I wanted as much time as possible to watch the light change from late afternoon into gold. If anything motivates me, it's wanting to get the shot. I'll climb a steep hill, race against the clock, for that. The only race I can ever see myself running.

I never once thought about turning back. That day had unusually clear weather for Fiesole, which is often too cloudy to see the valley completely. And the commute alone — at least an hour there and back — meant there was no way I'd come all this way, on a rare clear evening, and not get what I came for.

I felt no worry, no self-consciousness. None about being so out of shape my breath escaped faster than I could pull it back in. None about how excited I was, anticipating the warm tones my dreamiest Florence photos are known for. Just the cicadas in the trees, and the breeze moving through the grass.

And then, all at once, the path leveled out.

I walked past the convent to the viewing area — a simple stone overlook, low enough to sit on and rest. I saw the sky first: a hazy mauve pink. Then the hills south of the Arno, where Bellosguardo and Giardino Bardini and Piazzale Michelangelo sit. Then the whole city center of Florence, tucked into the valley, the river cutting through it. The Duomo — majestic, enormous, unmistakable from any street in the city — now just a tiny structure in the landscape. Santa Croce. Piazza della Signoria. Santo Spirito. Palazzo Pitti.

I stood still first, taking in the whole view, deciding how I wanted to frame my shots — what details I wanted to highlight, what I hadn't seen in anyone else's photos of this place. Then I went into full photographer mode, ideas fighting for my attention, and I started shooting. It's that rush — capturing as much as I can while the light is beautiful but changing fast — that I stop thinking so much about feeling winded.

I didn't know it yet, standing there with my camera still warm in my hands. But I'd just done — without noticing — the exact thing that field never let me do. I forgot to keep score.

It's been almost ten years since that evening. I used to know that city like the back of my hand. I'm not sure I still do — but I know this: I could climb that hill again, and I would. Not to prove I still can, but to see how a new version of me might frame the same view. Same sunset light, different eyes behind the camera.

I understand now that the rooms that made me feel weak were never rooms I was suited for — they were rooms I felt obligated to stand in. First the field, and later, other rooms too: jobs, relationships, cities, all measuring me by a strength I was never trying to have.

These days I choose more carefully. Not perfectly. I'm still learning the difference between obligation and alignment. But I take my time before I walk into a room now, wherever it might lead. I've stopped needing to win the race everyone else is running. I only ever wanted to catch the light before it changed.