Scrapbooks, camcorders, digital cameras, journals. There are so many forms of documentation we have available to us to keep our most cherished memories in. And if you haven’t started regularly documenting your life just yet, here’s why you should start this summer.
For me, documenting my life looks like keeping journals where I pour all my thoughts and emotions into every page. This is what I’ve used to chronicle my life the past seven years. When I flip through, I envision exactly how I felt in the moment, what my biggest problems in life were, but also the joyful moments that come with growing up. From the anxieties that came with moving from place to place, the gratification of making new friends, my first heartbreaks, stressing over perfectionism in school, even the seemingly smaller moments spent with family or friends that meant the world.
On some pages, I can even visibly see the emotions I was feeling from the scribble writing that came with frustrations, the tears staining the page, or the small hearts that filled the page when I was happy. Sometimes I look back and laugh at myself, other times I am filled with pride to see how much the girl writing those tear-stained pages has grown over the years.
Most recently, I have taken on a five-year journal that asks a question each day, meant to show reflection and growth over time. This was introduced to me by my older cousin, Jai, who has been writing in them religiously for years. When I first moved to California, she lived right in the room next to me, and I would always see her writing in her book every night and the dim light peeking through the sliver in her door. Sometimes, she would share a fond memory from the years prior and it would be a memory we reminisced over, while we laughed and talked about it before bed like two girls at a sleepover.
This experience inspired me to purchase my own five-year journal, where instead of journaling maybe once or twice a week, I could now journal every night and see how I have (or sometimes haven’t) changed over the year—from little preferences like music taste to more reflective ones about my personal hopes and dreams.
But documenting your life doesn’t just have to be in the form of writing. Instead, photos, videos, and scrapbooks are perfect to truly “capture” a moment in our lives. This was the case for my parents, who have piles of scrapbooks and discs filled with memories from before I was even a thought all the way to last Christmas for our annual family photo. When I look through them, I get a glimpse into life from their perspectives, a point of view I wouldn’t have been able to envision without these tangible memories. I see their smiles with friends of theirs I have yet to meet, and the faces of people who have helped raise me to this day.
With the digital age, our cellphones and the recent rise of digicams have made sharing photos and videos all the more easier. There’s a certain feeling of excitement that comes with uploading all the photos at the end of the night and choosing the perfect ones to post on social media, or even just keep in your favorites album to look back on from time to time. From our shared albums, I see what the same world we live in looks like through my friends’ eyes. All the different scenes that I may not have seen at the time are captured vividly, from picturesque photos for the main account, to silly videos for the more private spam.
Whichever form of documenting we choose, all these have the one goal of being able to preserve memories that we might have forgotten about otherwise. Documenting our lives allows us to share the smaller moments that we often take for granted. We connect with the people who are ever present and are brought back to people who sometimes have the role of passing by us. Life isn’t just about the big events and milestones, or just the happy ones. Living is being able to feel deeply and remember all the experiences that help create the person that we are becoming in this very moment.