This guest post is from Brook Smith. She’s a storm chaser and a up and coming star photographer. Check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and check out her Linktree, which includes links to purchase her work!
I’ve loved weather for as long as I can remember — I was maybe three or four the first time I remember being in a tornado watch. I didn’t even know what a tornado was yet. I looked out our back window and saw headlights in the distance and asked my mom if that was the tornado. She told me no, and told me what we actually were looking for. I wonder if she knew then that I’d grow up to chase them.
In third grade, I had decided I wanted to be a meteorologist. I was the weather girl. Always looking up. I spent my free time reading weather books, watching the Weather Channel, and taking pictures of clouds on any camera I could get my hands on. When we were driving, my family would quiz me on cloud types, amazed at the variety I knew. Every trip to Barnes & Noble meant checking the science section to see if anything new had come in. It’s the most constant passion I’ve ever had. It followed through junior high, into high school, and then into college.
My freshman year, I began at UND as an Atmospheric Sciences major. I loved my classes and the professors. But by the middle of my first semester of sophomore year, my love for weather was essentially dead. I couldn’t explain it, I don’t even know if I could have named it myself. People close to me noticed I no longer cared about the weather. I wasn’t me.
That semester, I made a really difficult decision to leave the program. I felt like I had failed — like I had let myself down, my professors down, my family. I grieved what the younger version of me would think of this. Who was I? The meeting to break the news to my advisor was very difficult. He believed in me. He told me he had hoped I would have become a TA one day. I walked back home with a pit in my stomach and a deep sense of wonder about why I had just done what I did.
For a few years, I didn’t know what to do with that loss. In the following months, I avoided talking about the weather. I didn’t post much on my weather Instagram. When people asked why I changed majors, I cringed. Every single conversation about it hurt. It genuinely felt like a part of me had been ripped away. I didn’t really see a hope for me and anything weather-related in the future.
In early 2019, I met Connor — now my husband. One of the first things we connected over was our shared love for the weather. He was a meteorology major, and getting to talk with someone who just got it — the awe, the science, the beauty — helped bring some of my passion back to life. He never made me feel ashamed for leaving the program. He still talked weather with me, because he knew I still loved it deep down.
During those first few months of knowing each other, we’d geek out over winter systems and the upcoming spring flood. At one point, he invited me to join a storm chasing trip with the Atmospheric Sciences department that summer. I turned it down — partly because of the cost, but also because I was still carrying a lot of shame about switching majors. But somehow, he convinced me to sign up for a Severe and Hazardous Weather class that fall. And I’m so glad he did.
My passion for weather was coming back.
In 2020, I started chasing again, just at a very beginner level. I didn’t fully know what I was doing with forecasting, but I was having fun. After a busy few summers, I fully dove into storm chasing in 2023. After a little forecast refresher from Connor and the internet, I started forecasting for my chases. It was rocky, honestly, but I chased everything I could that year. At some point, amid it all, I stopped saying “oh, I just like to take pictures of storms” and started saying “Yeah, I am a storm chaser.”
This change in how I viewed myself was a pivotal moment in my storm chasing career. I didn’t just see myself as “Brook who likes the weather and sometimes takes pictures of it”, I saw myself as “Brook, the storm chaser.” I didn’t necessarily feel like I had earned the right to call myself a storm chaser — not yet. It felt like a title reserved for people with more experience, more confidence, more everything. But when I finally said it out loud, something shifted. It quieted the doubt and broke through the imposter syndrome that had held me back. From that point forward, I started chasing differently + with purpose.
In June 2024, I was chasing a storm in South Dakota. It was one of the first chases I had been on with a lot of other chasers. As I was repositioning during the chase, blaring the Twister theme, I realized something —
I was chasing my dreams.
That dream that I thought was long gone was actually just beginning. It wasn’t as I had always thought. Not as a forecast meteorologist. Not with a degree. Instead, I was out there, chasing the sky and capturing its beauty.
It’s the version of the dream I didn’t know could even happen.
It took some time to realize that I hadn’t failed — and that I hadn’t missed my shot at fulfilling my dreams. When Connor and I got married, it was hard watching him step into a career I once imagined for myself. He’d come home with these cool weather and forecast stories from work, and honestly… it hurt. Part of me felt like he was living the life nine-year-old me always wanted.
But as I grew, I learned that God had a better plan for my passion.
The truth is, I would’ve felt stuck inside that version of the dream. I don’t want to be behind a desk while the sky comes to life outside. I want to be in it.
Chasing.
What I thought was a closed door was actually a redirection — the dreams I had never left. They just looked different from what I had thought.
The confidence I have in myself didn’t show up overnight. There’s been a lot of moments where I’ve disqualified myself before anyone else could. There were a lot of failures I had to dredge through. But when I captured the narrative I was telling myself and reframed it in a positive light, my confidence began to grow. It grew through every hard decision, every bust, every chase, every botched forecast, and each time I showed up anyway.
So maybe you’re reading this and you’re sitting on a dream you haven’t touched in a while — if you’ve decided it’s too late, or you’re not good enough, or it’ll never work out — I hope this reminds you that confidence grows the minute you move. Start small.
Take the first step.
Your dream doesn’t have to run out of the gates at 100 MPH today. Just get out of idleness. I promise, it’s not — and it never will be — too late to start.
And someday you’ll look up one day, like I did, and realize… holy crap. This is the dream.
No one else can decide what your dream gets to look like. But you do get to decide whether to go for it.
So go.
I thought my childhood dreams were gone forever.
And now? I chase them.
Literally. 🌪️
If you liked this post from Brook, check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and check out her Linktree, which includes links to purchase her work!