The room went very still.
“They are competent,” she continued. “But they are not hungry. They are not curious. They are not risky.”
Thomas stopped tapping his pen.
I wanted to argue.
I wanted to say I was doing night shoots, and internships, and three classes, and?—
But it all sounded like excuses even in my head.
Mischa didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.
“You didn’t fail,” she said. “But you left yourself out of them.”
Noor glanced at me, eyes soft.
That somehow hurt more.
But I nodded like I was absorbing it. Like I wasn’t already cataloging everything I’d done wrong this week in a neat little mental spreadsheet.
Tired.
Not hungry. Not curious. Not risky.
It felt unfair. It also felt accurate.
Class ended without ceremony. People packed up quietly, the usual post-critique energy muted, like we’d all agreed not to make too much noise around something fragile.
Noor squeezed my arm on the way out. “Next one,” she said gently.
“Yeah,” I replied, already half gone.
My phone buzzed as I stepped into the hallway.
René:
Where are the raws from this morning?
My stomach dropped.
I’d sent him the previews. The selects. The edited set.
Not the raws.
I pulled my camera out of my bag, fingers moving on muscle memory as I scrolled back through the files—and that’s when I saw it.
The exposure values were wrong.
Not catastrophic. Not unusable.
Butoff.
ISO too high. Shutter a fraction too slow. A softness that wasn’t artistic, just… imprecise.
The kind of mistake I hadn’t made in years. I stared at the screen, pulse ticking louder in my ears. Same week. Same brain. Same problem.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing. It was that I was doing too much of it at once.
