For someone who tells other people’s stories for a living, I don’t necessarily do a great job of documenting my own.
Any attempts at journaling always start out strong for about a week before petering out into nothingness. My Instagram account is a sparse representation of my life at best, offering glimpses of articles I’m working on, the people I’m with, or, when all else fails, the Maine scenery I’m observing. The closest thing I have to daily reflections is my planner, but even that reads more as aspirations and less as ruminations.
So, at the start of this year, I resolved to be more diligent in recording the events of 2021 by repeating a project from my senior year of college. Every day for that school year, I filmed at least one second of video, all of which were compiled into a long montage and set to music. It was a fun way not only to document my last year at Iowa State University, but also my final year as an Iowa resident, something I was unaware of at the time.
I thought, as I filmed a bonfire for my first clip of 2021, that this year’s video would capture a return to normalcy from the “unprecedented times” of the COVID-19 pandemic. While that remains to be seen, I have managed to document some other big life moments, like moving into my new apartment, meeting my friends’ newborn son, and reuniting with family and friends I had not seen in person in years.
However, I’ve also captured some of the quieter moments, the ones that would likely go unmentioned in a journal or unshared on social media. Weekday walks, morning cups of coffee, lounging with a friend’s dog – all of the in-between moments that would likely have been forgotten by year’s end are documented, each one with a specific memory attached to it.
Some of these clips will likely end up on the cutting room floor when it comes time to compile the montage (there are only 259 seconds in the song I’m using) but for now, I’m grateful I took the time to document each one, if only to remind me to appreciate similar moments as they come up in the future.
