One day during my senior year of college, when I was working day in and day out at a breakneck pace, my life came to a very sudden, brief stop.

I was working 30 hours a week at the school newspaper, putting in another 30 hours a week at an internship and putting about 20 more hours a week into my capstone courses at school.

In my free time, rather than sleep, I tried to learn photography and, when I wasn't occupied with something productive, I would go out drinking with my friends until 2 a.m.

I was young and I felt young. But I coped well with the pressure, bottling my stress inside or drinking it away.

Until one day. After a long night with my friends, I woke up with what was not a hangover, but a bonafide exhaustion attack. I was finished. I was in tears, the pressure of everything I had to get done coming crashing down. The day before, my boss took one look at me when I walked into my internship and told me to go home. I objected, but he wouldn't budge.

"You look like shit," he told me.

When my body decided to quit on me the next day, I drove to meet my mother at an Applebee's in Mira Mesa where she promised to feed me and talk me through everything.

By the time the food arrived, I couldn't even sit up. We took the food to go and I climbed into my mother's mini van. I threw up into the Applebee's bag. But what happened next solved everything, at least temporarily. I went home.

It was just for a night or two. But I shut out the pressures of work and school and partying and meeting girls and I slept and ate real food made by a real mother.

Lately I've been feeling a bit melancholy again. I feel pressure, yes, but not the same type of all-day-slog, energy-drink-fueled pressure that I felt before. No, the pressure now is different. It's a pressure to keep growing my craft when I've already had success relative to what I ever expected. It's pressure to innovate and push my work into new frontiers. It's the pressure of looking around and comparing yourself to the 25-year-old who's shooting for a better publication than you are, while looking at the 45-year-old who's seen and done it all, and wondering how you'll ever get there.

In this field we all feel like this from time to time. In an effort not to combat the feelings but to mitigate them with something that heals me through familiarity, I'm beginning a new project.

These first photos are from homes -- my childhood home and my brother's new home -- during the Thanksgiving holidays. But the familiarity isn't just the subject matter. For this new project, I'll be documenting everyday life with the tools I used as a child -- whichever ones I can drag out of the closets of my parents' home.

These 14 frames are from a Pentax Zoom 70 . It's cracked up near the flash, but it turns out it still works. It doesn't do the "Zoom" part of the "Zoom 70" anymore, but I will get by without it. And in the coming weeks, I'll be trying to drag out other tools that I used as a child to see what's still in working order.

I'm not going to call this a personal project. All projects are personal. This is just a new exploration that will help me feel at home with a camera in my hands.