Documenting My Life

Sep 24, 2013

I'm way into documenting my life.

I could say that my day-to-day life is pretty boring. I work at home and don't leave the house on most days. J and I are definitely homebodies. We like relaxing in our apartment and consuming media, playing games, and making homemade food. We do make the time to go on adventures, but I think loving being at home most of the time makes those adventures more enjoyable and exciting. I love documenting my life.

I'm the best person to tell my story and my story is pretty cool.

I've been a "scrapbooker" since high-school. I distinctly remember walking into one of those big-box stores,with super high ceilings and way too bright florescent lighting, to pick up art supplies for a school project. That one trip quickly turned into a small obsession. I was in love with the pretty paper and embellishments I could use to tell my stories. Fast forward more than a decade and I've found a true zeal to really document my life. I'm kind of a cool person, definitely a weirdo and definitely an introvert, but still kinda cool. It's important for the weirdos and the introverts of the world to talk about who they are, because they don't get too many chances.

I want to document who I am and what it's like to see the world from my perspective.

We all have different perspectives. No two people can be standing in the exact same spot at the exact same moment in time. Which means we all get a different point of view every single time. Sure those points of view may be very similar, but they're still unique to each of us. All of those points of view add up to make us the people we are. Our ideas, morals, and personalities are formed by those viewpoints.

The summation of my stories is who I am.

That's what makes me so excited to document my stories. If someone were to come into my home and look through all of my memory-keeping creations, they would get a great sense of who I am and the things that are important to me. I think that's just the coolest thing. So that's been my number one priority lately: Re-invigorated life documenting. I feel so strongly in my heart of hearts that I have stories that need to be told. I feel so very strongly that EVERYONE has stories that need to be told. Let's tell our stories. Let's tell them the way we want them to be told.

Now that I've made documenting my life a high priority I've found a style that is really working for me. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but it's kind of a combination of photo-minimalism and a high-school diary. Yeah -- two pretty disparate styles, but they work for me. I'm really into photos and text with minimalist embellishing. It just feels so clean. It also forces me to take better pictures and write with brevity. I LOVE when I take better pictures and write meaningful things with just a few words. It makes me smile when I'm working on it, it makes me smile when I'm finished, and it makes me smile when I look at it again. That's all I can ever ask for. There are a couple of seriously talented people that I've been super inspired by lately, including Liz Tamanaha, Jamaica Makes, Ann-Marie Morris and Elise Blaha Cripe. I am just enthralled with the way Elise is documenting the birth and baby days of her new daughter -- she's on my must read every day blog list. She knows how to tell her stories and I am in awe.