Namaste: the artist in me bows to the scientist in me

When it got time to choose a "career", I declared I was going to study chemistry. My mom rolled her eyes. She knew that I was going to be a writer (in Spanish, of course, a language I master and have a handle of better than a hair brush), and she filed it as another one of my teenage phases. My best pal and cousin, three years older than me, who I idolized and imitated, was half way through her college chemistry degree, and mother knew best that it was just a matter of months, if not weeks, before I came to my senses. But I had an alter motive.

The first reason why I wanted to study chemistry, besides following in the steps of my bestie, was that language seemed so obvious to me. I knew all the grammatical rules, had read enough books to have a more than rich vocabulary, and loved to write for the fun of it. Studying it as a career seemed no challenge at all; I knew I was going to be content, and that is never enough for me as a motivation. I also envisioned that studying literature as a profession was going to take all the fun out of writing. And to top it all, I was going to end up mostly teaching, instead of writing, to a generation that obviously did not appreciate language the way I did (something I couldn't fully envision then, but which has become obvious now, when kids think "your" and "you're" are interchangeable...)

The second reason was more obvious to me and less clear to my folks. I knew I wanted to move abroad; I had had a taste of it visiting Vancouver towards the end of high school for six weeks, and I knew literature wasn't going to get me there. Chemistry, on the other hand, is universal. To breach both worlds, and ease my mother's mind when classes started and I did not register in the humanities, I pursue both chemistry and English translation.

Chemistry has served me well. It has taken me to where I am today in life. It was, undoubtedly, a challenge, but I conquered it to the extent I needed to and when, after having two children, I decided it was time to go back to work, it made sense that the artist in me would knock on my inner door and demand to be heard. My photography work serves itself, effortlessly and quietly, from that muse that has been shyly waiting to be heard for two decades.

When I photograph clients, I follow certain guidelines that I learned from the pros. I know how to make a body look stunning, an outfit look flattering, a smile say it all. When I am not constrained by those guidelines, I create. I write with images, which are more universal than words, and love those images more than anything I have ever created (my children aside). Those images don't sell to the kind of client I'm pursuing, or translate clearly in the empowering process women are craving, but they fill my soul and inform everything I do. I am an artist and a scientist, and the ways in which each of those fields have shaped my brain, my view and understanding of the world, and my senses, is complementary and enriching. The people that I have encountered in one and the other disciplines have been as diverse as enriching, and they are the reason my life is as colorful as it is. I can expose in manual and detect NO −
3 to the ppb level in water using IR technology. Not too shabby for a short, brown, foreign woman, don't you think?