Press play to listen to the audio version of this post. The voiceover was generated by Speechify AI.
To Whom It May Concern:
There’s this saying, “We are the sum total of our experiences.”
Whether these experiences are positive or negative, mundane or extraordinary, they make us the person we are.
I’ve never really struggled with documenting my life. But rather, I’ve struggled with documenting too much during the positive and too little during the negative. From memorabilia to the thousands of photos and videos on my computer, there came a point where it felt like I was collecting things just to store them away.
Everyone documents their life in some way, shape, or form, but why should we do it and how do we make it meaningful?
This is the biggest mistake I made in my 20s: failing to document my cancer journey.
In those challenging times, I rarely picked up my camera, convinced that documentation was reserved for 2 things only – happy moments and public display.
As I stepped into my 30s, it became clear that’s not what documentation is about. I now try my best to capture the moments in my life – the good, the bad, the celebrations, the mundane – because at any given moment, things can forever change that take away moments we may never get back. That’s what cancer did.
There’s so many different ways to document meaningfully such as printing tangible photos and curating them in classic albums, journaling lengthy reflections to quick notes, and filming snippets of your life.
Here’s the point:
Documenting your life isn’t always for an audience. It’s for you.
Because in the end, I think we really are the sum total of our experiences.
Breast regards,
Michelle
P.S. I filmed two short-form video versions of this blog post on Instagram.
Click here to view Part 1.
Click here to view Part 2.
