FlatKat Photography

09/23/2026

you've done hard things before. 🤍

09/23/2026

Full of Hope today aren't I?

There’s a kind of tiredness that sleep doesn’t completely fix.

It comes from spending too long in survival mode.

Always solving the next problem.
Always waiting for something to settle.
Always saying, “I just need to get through this week.”

And after a while, you can become so used to surviving that you forget to ask what you actually want life to feel like.

So here’s a question worth keeping:

If life didn’t need to become perfect, what would make it feel 10% more like living again?

Maybe it’s having something to look forward to.

More time with people who make you feel like yourself.

A morning that isn’t rushed.

Doing something because you enjoy it, not because it’s useful.

Or finally putting down something you’ve carried for too long.

You don’t have to rebuild your entire life at once.

Sometimes the next chapter begins with one small decision that says:

I don’t want to only get through my days anymore. I want to be in them.

I hope life gives you more moments where you notice that happening.👋

Save this for when life starts feeling like something you’re only getting through.

09/23/2026

I'm struggling with this one

🙏🏾❤️‍🩹🙌🏾 Not everyone leaving is a loss. Some are answered prayers.

09/23/2026

Again, trying

10 things you need to let go of...

09/23/2026

In November 2024, 22-year-old Lorenzo Monfardini graduated from the Federal University of Ouro Preto with a degree in production engineering. But instead of celebrating his graduation in the usual way, Lorenzo decided to honor the person who had helped make his education possible: his father, Jefferson Gomes Monfardini.

During the graduation ceremony, Lorenzo carried a butane gas cylinder onto the stage. He then lifted the cylinder above his head in front of everyone. The unusual moment was a tribute to his father, who had spent 26 years working in the commercial department of a gas delivery company to support his son’s education.

For Lorenzo, the gas cylinder represented the hard work and sacrifices his father had carried for many years. The moment was later described as a symbol of “the burden his father bore so he could receive his degree.”

A video of Lorenzo proudly holding the cylinder above his head quickly spread online. Many people were touched by the meaning behind the unusual graduation tribute.

The idea reportedly came from Lorenzo’s mother, who wanted her son to recognize his father’s years of hard work.

Although the graduation ceremony happened in 2024, the story resurfaced in mid-2026 and once again went viral around the world.

Lorenzo’s graduation became more than a celebration of his own achievement. It became a public thank-you to his father for the years of work and sacrifice that helped him reach that moment.

09/23/2026

09/23/2026

09/23/2026

Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Germany and grew up in Los Angeles. His childhood was difficult, and his relationship with his father was often violent. As a young man, he struggled with poverty, alcoholism, loneliness, and rejection. He spent years working ordinary jobs while writing stories and poems that very few people wanted to publish.

The moment that changed his life came when he finally decided to stop trying to become the writer other people wanted him to be. After years of rejection, he abandoned writing for a period and worked at the post office. But writing never really left him. Eventually, at the age of 49, he accepted a small publishing offer and left his job to write full-time. He had spent decades waiting for his chance, and when it finally came, he was already middle-aged.

One of the hardest lessons Bukowski learned was that your work may remain unnoticed for a very long time. He knew what it meant to write without applause, money, or certainty. Yet he kept returning to the page. His life was messy and far from inspirational in the traditional sense, but beneath it was an unusual stubbornness: he refused to completely abandon the thing he felt compelled to do.

One of his most famous lines captures that spirit: “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”

Bukowski's life reminds us that talent means very little without endurance. Sometimes the world ignores your work for years. Sometimes you have to keep creating without knowing whether anyone will ever care. The question is whether you can continue anyway.

📍If you love powerful quotes, you’ll love this book.

200 Quotes That Will Change the Way You Think is filled with ideas worth reading, reflecting on, and remembering.

📖 Get your copy. Link in bio.

09/23/2026

Harriet Tubman’s story did not end with the Underground Railroad or the Civil War. She lived until 1913, surrounded by younger generations of a family whose history stretched from slavery into freedom. Among those relatives were Eva and Alida Stewart, pictured here around 1910. They were Tubman’s great-nieces, descendants of her brother John Stewart, one of the brothers Harriet helped escape from Maryland in 1854. Their photograph gives us a rare opportunity to look beyond Harriet herself and see members of the family whose freedom she had risked her life to secure.

John Stewart had been enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore alongside other members of the Tubman family. After Harriet escaped slavery in 1849, she repeatedly returned to Maryland to guide relatives and others north. In December 1854, she helped John and two of her other brothers, Ben and Henry, escape. The journey eventually brought members of the family to Canada, where the Fugitive Slave Act could not legally force them back into slavery. Following the Civil War, members of the extended family established new lives in freedom, while Harriet settled in Auburn, New York, where her home became an important gathering place for relatives and others in need.

By the time Eva and Alida were photographed, they belonged to a generation coming of age nearly half a century after emancipation. Their lives unfolded in an America that had abolished slavery but had by no means achieved racial equality. Black Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, racial violence and widespread discrimination, yet this was also a period of tremendous institution-building within Black communities. Families pursued education, established businesses, built churches and civic organizations, and created lives that previous generations had fought desperately to make possible.