I have this box of photos that captured pieces of my life. They remind me of time, places, experiences, but most importantly people. I love going through this box, I love sharing this box and I’m excited to gift this box to my son, so he can remember me.
The problem is that these memories stopped, over 10 years ago. I literally don’t have photos of my son printed out, put in an album, the way photos were shared with me.
There are photos on Facebook, but I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that it’s dying off, the once channel that changed our life and was something we can’t live without, has become something I check once a week. Will it be around long after I am gone?
Then back to my own life, for the past 10+ years, I have taken photos on my phone, I have accidentally deleted them, or stored them somewhere I can’t remember or access anymore. So now there’s this massive gap between the last photos taken of me in the early 2000s and now.
Thanks to the internet wayback machine I can view some sites I built, but who would know what to look for. As I have built sites in various media types, only so much of it is recorded and as we slim down our portfolios or simply capture a few screens, how will anyone know what I have done in my lifetime. Now while I could dedicate a whole bunch of time adding everything to this website, I can’t renew this domain for eternity, so what do I do. This is who I am, what I have done and where I spent the majority of my life.
I plan on looking for as many photos as I can, and printing as many of them as I can to share with my son, to document my story for him. I plan on deleting the rubbish to reduce my data footprint and make it more manageable and finding a way of storing this record online. The same goes for my work, there just has to be a way I haven’t thought of yet. While also making an effort to document more of my life, which I honestly don’t really share. I really just regurgitate what’s going on in the industry now or will get some attention, so people think I’m smart, get inspired and shamelessly hire me so that I can pay the bills.
It’s time to start doing a better job of capturing my life, to remind myself and those that care about my journey. How do you record yours?