Who Needs Time Capsules?
This is probably true of many people, but I've found as I get older I no longer feel as strong a desire to write about my life, nor do I feel that I have as much time to do so. Granted, I fell off the LJ train kind of a long time ago, but I was still trying to record something somewhere. My second year of grad school, I made a resolution to journal (by hand) every single day that year, and I actually made it at least through the end of March before I got too depressed and exhausted to feel that it was worth doing. Honestly, after all the moving we've done in the past year, I'm not even sure where that journal is, but it's somewhere - a document of my spiral into madness as I grew closer to graduation.
Nowdays? I make voice memos for myself and only myself, usually when I have insomnia for some reason or another, and I save them on my computer and rarely listen back to them. That tradition started about a year ago, when I was home alone almost all the time waiting to transfer to the Chicago area and join Skot, who was already out there. I needed to talk to someone, even if that someone was just me. At that time I did listen back to the recordings, because sometimes they reminded me that I am an intelligent, rad person and not a complete mess like I often convince myself I am. So it's sort of a "recording for posterity" thing (I'll usually log someone's death, for instance), but mostly a self-psychotherapy technique. It isn't about sharing. I feel like at this point we have more than enough of that.
Something I'm beginning to understand more as I get older is photographs. I so very much dislike being in photos that having to take senior photos in high school was one of the only arguments I remember having with my parents as a teen (I still think we could have done without, but I get it now). My usual style of photographs is: architecture, landscapes, nature, or any details that catch my eye. Aesthetics, usually free of humans. These photos are fun to take and beautiful to look at, even when they aren't actually well composed. Like my voice posts, they are mostly for me.
I found out my aunt, recently deceased, also had a similar photography style when we were going through some of her old photos before the funeral. It broke my heart a little because just like my photos, few were labeled, and almost none recorded any major life events or important people (including herself) - they were devoid of "story" compared to family portraits, home videos, or selfies. I'm sure they meant a lot to her and reminded her of key events in her life, but to us they were mysterious and largely mundane. A blurry shot of a street who-knows-where, five nearly identical photos of barges on a river, far-away shots of a parade, some trees or buildings (again, unnamed). Those photos aren't meant for us, and the especially aren't meant to be viewed without her there to provide their context and meaning.
I'm afraid it is the same with most of my photos. I have a lot of images of, say, a dead fox on a stone wall, or a fire hydrant covered in ice, or a storm drain cover I thought looked extra neat. I know and cherish the contexts of all of those, but there's no message there for anyone else. The exception is the photos I've taken of my pet rats. We take so so many photos of our rats (or rather 'rat' now that one is dead)! Objectively too many photos of rats. Only a few are any good. But by golly will whoever looks at those after I die know that I loved those tiny mammals. I even made a Christmas card, accomplishing documentation of both the human and non-human members of our family!
This is a recent change. We still don't have many photos taken of ourselves, but there are wedding photos and christmas party photos and vacation photos that do exist and can tell people something of our life together. And sometimes I look back on those with wonder. When I proposed to Skot I struggled to find photographs to populate the website I was making, and I discovered how important the ones I could find felt. Not that old blog posts didn't also add a lot to the experience of rediscovering our shared history, but those are more personal and specific. Strangers can look at photos of people and/or animals and understand something from that. We have whole traditions and customs built around that very thing. Pretty much any successful social media platform these days trades almost exclusively in such photos. And I get it. You have a kid, and they metamorphose before your eyes and sometimes the only way you can tell is to step back and look at frozen moments in their life so far. If you go to the Grand Canyon and take a photo of that, it may look just like anyone's Grand Canyon vacation, but if you are in the shot! - that means something else now. It's your Grand Canyon photo.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make here. Something about the tension between recording life for private reflection, and recording it for those who surround you to enjoy. Sometimes I feel like "the whole world" isn't really who I want to share myself with, because I know it doesn't care. At other times, that exact inability for the world to give a shit is what emboldens me to post my rat photos or mention a cool event I went to or whatever (still carefully curated) thing. Both instincts are important. I think as I get older I will continue intentionally separating the "big public signifiers" and the "small private details," that my teenage self lumped together as a matter of course.
I guess I'm hedging my bets. So much of life feels grey to me right now - full of ups and downs and ambiguities - that I no longer feel certain that I will look back on any one moment with fondness. If the small stuff stops mattering to me, and it never mattered to anyone else, then the "life event" stuff is all that's left. I hope that isn't where things are headed. But if it is: sorry, people who survive me. Maybe you did want to know more about my thoughts and experiences than I ever shared with you. Maybe you were like "but how was life adjusting to a new branch of the industrial supply warehouse you worked at briefly?" or "what made you hate Illinois so much?" or "which coworker randomly died and how did that make you feel?" If so, track down my voice memo files and take a listen. Assuming those files are still playable in the future, and I ever told anyone how to find them.
Nowdays? I make voice memos for myself and only myself, usually when I have insomnia for some reason or another, and I save them on my computer and rarely listen back to them. That tradition started about a year ago, when I was home alone almost all the time waiting to transfer to the Chicago area and join Skot, who was already out there. I needed to talk to someone, even if that someone was just me. At that time I did listen back to the recordings, because sometimes they reminded me that I am an intelligent, rad person and not a complete mess like I often convince myself I am. So it's sort of a "recording for posterity" thing (I'll usually log someone's death, for instance), but mostly a self-psychotherapy technique. It isn't about sharing. I feel like at this point we have more than enough of that.
Something I'm beginning to understand more as I get older is photographs. I so very much dislike being in photos that having to take senior photos in high school was one of the only arguments I remember having with my parents as a teen (I still think we could have done without, but I get it now). My usual style of photographs is: architecture, landscapes, nature, or any details that catch my eye. Aesthetics, usually free of humans. These photos are fun to take and beautiful to look at, even when they aren't actually well composed. Like my voice posts, they are mostly for me.
I found out my aunt, recently deceased, also had a similar photography style when we were going through some of her old photos before the funeral. It broke my heart a little because just like my photos, few were labeled, and almost none recorded any major life events or important people (including herself) - they were devoid of "story" compared to family portraits, home videos, or selfies. I'm sure they meant a lot to her and reminded her of key events in her life, but to us they were mysterious and largely mundane. A blurry shot of a street who-knows-where, five nearly identical photos of barges on a river, far-away shots of a parade, some trees or buildings (again, unnamed). Those photos aren't meant for us, and the especially aren't meant to be viewed without her there to provide their context and meaning.
I'm afraid it is the same with most of my photos. I have a lot of images of, say, a dead fox on a stone wall, or a fire hydrant covered in ice, or a storm drain cover I thought looked extra neat. I know and cherish the contexts of all of those, but there's no message there for anyone else. The exception is the photos I've taken of my pet rats. We take so so many photos of our rats (or rather 'rat' now that one is dead)! Objectively too many photos of rats. Only a few are any good. But by golly will whoever looks at those after I die know that I loved those tiny mammals. I even made a Christmas card, accomplishing documentation of both the human and non-human members of our family!
This is a recent change. We still don't have many photos taken of ourselves, but there are wedding photos and christmas party photos and vacation photos that do exist and can tell people something of our life together. And sometimes I look back on those with wonder. When I proposed to Skot I struggled to find photographs to populate the website I was making, and I discovered how important the ones I could find felt. Not that old blog posts didn't also add a lot to the experience of rediscovering our shared history, but those are more personal and specific. Strangers can look at photos of people and/or animals and understand something from that. We have whole traditions and customs built around that very thing. Pretty much any successful social media platform these days trades almost exclusively in such photos. And I get it. You have a kid, and they metamorphose before your eyes and sometimes the only way you can tell is to step back and look at frozen moments in their life so far. If you go to the Grand Canyon and take a photo of that, it may look just like anyone's Grand Canyon vacation, but if you are in the shot! - that means something else now. It's your Grand Canyon photo.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make here. Something about the tension between recording life for private reflection, and recording it for those who surround you to enjoy. Sometimes I feel like "the whole world" isn't really who I want to share myself with, because I know it doesn't care. At other times, that exact inability for the world to give a shit is what emboldens me to post my rat photos or mention a cool event I went to or whatever (still carefully curated) thing. Both instincts are important. I think as I get older I will continue intentionally separating the "big public signifiers" and the "small private details," that my teenage self lumped together as a matter of course.
I guess I'm hedging my bets. So much of life feels grey to me right now - full of ups and downs and ambiguities - that I no longer feel certain that I will look back on any one moment with fondness. If the small stuff stops mattering to me, and it never mattered to anyone else, then the "life event" stuff is all that's left. I hope that isn't where things are headed. But if it is: sorry, people who survive me. Maybe you did want to know more about my thoughts and experiences than I ever shared with you. Maybe you were like "but how was life adjusting to a new branch of the industrial supply warehouse you worked at briefly?" or "what made you hate Illinois so much?" or "which coworker randomly died and how did that make you feel?" If so, track down my voice memo files and take a listen. Assuming those files are still playable in the future, and I ever told anyone how to find them.