Case Study
From a suffocating apartment to landscape photography from a helicopter
A personal case study in uncertainty, self-expression, and building a life with more room in it.
A life too small
When Bec first started working with Filimon, she was not short on personality, ability, or imagination.
That was never the issue.
The issue was that the life she was living had become too small for who she was. She was riddled with hesitation and anxiety, working in a job she hated, and living in a city apartment surrounded by concrete that felt like it was suffocating her. Her head felt cluttered. Her environment had no room for the things that gave her energy: art, creativity, self-expression, music, nature, movement, and the pull toward van life.
She did not need another motivational idea.
She needed to start building a different relationship with uncertainty.
At the time, uncertainty meant something heavy. If she did not know what she was doing, she made that mean she was stupid. If she wanted help, she worried she was bothering people. If she expressed herself too much, she judged herself as awkward. If she wanted a different life, she could feel the desire but struggled to trust the next move.
Starting small
So the work started small.
Not with a grand plan. Not with a complete reinvention. With actions small enough to move.
One of the early steps was going to the botanical gardens with a chair and drawing what was around her. That mattered. Not because drawing in nature solves a life, but because it interrupted the pattern. It put her body somewhere different. It gave her creativity somewhere to go. It gave her a different energy and emotional state to act from.
From there, the work kept returning to the same question: what kind of life is actually trying to be built here?
Again and again, Bec came back to adventure, freedom, creativity, travel, music, art, and working in a way that could move with her. She started doing floor plans for van life. She began exploring how to work from the road. She practised asking for support, even though it felt foreign. She started using video because it was a better expression of who she was than trying to write everything perfectly. She gave herself permission to practice being herself.
Awkward, or unique
A key distinction was the difference between being awkward and being unique.
That one mattered. It became an aha moment.
Bec had spent a long time judging parts of herself that were not problems. They were part of her edge. Her quirkiness was not something to flatten. It needed to be understood, owned, and used with awareness. That changed how she saw herself. It gave her more room to move without constantly editing herself down.
Then came one of the clearest declarations in the work:
“I’m going to approach each day with wonder and curiosity, like a four-year-old in a Batman shirt.”
That line became more than a nice phrase. It became a way of entering the unknown without needing to have the whole map first.
Into the unknown
And the unknown became very real.
A client invited her to live on a moored yacht that was not being used. She knew nothing about boats. She was terrified of the upcoming tropical storms. But she did it anyway.
Then came the problems.
Each breakdown became another conversation in the work - another chance for Bec to see what the problem brought up in her, how she was relating to it, and what she could do next. Batteries. Electrical issues. Water pumps. The kind of practical breakdowns that would have once confirmed every old story about not being capable or not knowing enough. Instead, she watched YouTube videos, learned what needed to be learned, and fixed what she could fix.
She was still scared, and that is the point.
The change was not that fear disappeared. The change was that fear no longer got the final say because she now viewed things through the lens of adventure and curiosity, not just anxiety and doubt.
From the yacht, her life kept moving. She later moved outside the city and into a quaint coastal town. The noise dropped, nature returned, and new connections opened. The life that once existed only as a quiet pull started becoming physical.
Then travel and adventure pulled again. She moved to a new mountainous region, lived on a farm, bought a four-wheel-drive, and learned how to take it off road. She changed career direction and began studying photography. Almost immediately, she started getting clients by bringing her own quirky way of seeing to the work.
That same woman who had once felt trapped in an apartment, buried in admin work, and stuck in an office with people she didn’t enjoy being around was now being commissioned to shoot landscapes from a helicopter.
The shift
That is the case study.
Not because a yacht, a farm, a four-wheel-drive, or a helicopter are the point.
They are not.
The point is the shift in how she related to herself and the unknown.
Bec stopped treating uncertainty as evidence that she was lost. She stopped making fear mean she should stay where she was. She stopped trying to become a more acceptable version of herself and started building a life with enough space for who she actually was.
She also came to accept something most people spend their lives fighting: a life built through adventure and wonder does not mean you finally get everything under control.
As Bec put it, “I don’t think I will ever have my shit together, and that’s what makes it fun.”
And that was not resignation. That was freedom.
From a suffocating city apartment to landscape photography from a helicopter.
That is what happened when the four-year-old in the Batman shirt finally got room to move.
“Whenever I find myself at a point in life where things aren’t moving, I call Filimon. It usually means I need a good kick up the arse - and he’s the best person to do that in a way that still feels caring.”— Bec
Coming soon