As I mentioned last week, my big project of late has been scanning old photos so I have them digitally. One of my biggest fears was always that something would happen to those photos, as my only backup was a box of doubles in my basement. Conversely, I've always backed up my digital photos in multiple places. I'd print my favorites, save them on two computers, and burn them onto a CD. Most of the pictures are also either on my iPod or phone, too. But all of those things could be destroyed in one shot--say, a house fire, God forbid--so I finally found Flickr to be my best option to store them all online. I don't really know what would happen if I wanted to download them all someday, but I'm just happy they're there.
But my old pre-digital photos were a different story. I had the same film camera from the spring of 1992 through the summer of 2006. It was a confirmation gift, and came just in time for my 8th grade class trip. I used it through high school, college, my first years on my own, and right through our first three years of marriage. It was large and loud, and I definitely had a love-hate relationship with it. But digital scared me a bit and I'm honestly not even sure what finally prompted me to make the switch. Maybe it was a good sale and I couldn't pass it up, or maybe I was looking ahead to our impending Seattle-Portland trip, or maybe something changed with film processing and I just decided it was time. The pictures I took on that Seattle-Portland trip amaze me to this day, and I've never regretted the decision for a second.
But oh, those pre-digital pictures...something needed to be done. I look through my digital pictures all the time, and I always wished I could do that with my old pictures. Despite the iffy quality, there were some cool pictures and great memories in those shots, and I needed to get them backed up. But knowing there were probably at least 1500 of them made the project seem daunting. I own a scanner, an older one I picked up from the computer graveyard at my old office. The old stuff was going and we were allowed to take what we wanted. I saw the scanner and happily brought it home. It's been attached to our old desktop and I've used it here and there--enough to make it worthwhile, anyway. And honestly, I did look through my pictures a few years back and scan my absolute favorites. Some had been done previously for my college website, and the rest were just other random favorites. But so many memories were really dependent on having all of the photos, so I knew I had to get it done.
I did not like the thought of sitting in our basement office for hours on end, so I decided to bring the scanner up to the living room and set it up next to the La-Z-Boy so I could just hook up my laptop whenever I wanted. Of course, when I tried to do it, the software was so old that it took me a couple hours to find a solution to make it work on a new computer. But I did, and it only took a couple weeks' worth of evenings, an hour or two here and there, to get through all of my albums, including one that held a bunch of random candids from my babyhood through my wedding that originally belonged to my grandparents. It ended up being around 1800 pictures total. I still have more I could do, from albums my mom put together for me with doubles from their albums, to some random pictures of the kids that we've been given over the years. And it's crossed my mind to eventually do my parents' albums--a gold mine of amazing memories.
Going through the albums had some interesting consequences, though. I didn't expect the range of emotions I felt as I went through the various stages. Of course I grimaced a bit at my awkward phases right up through the beginning of high school. I felt sad for teenage me who wanted so badly for a boy to like her. I was actually sort of shocked at how cute I looked at times, and sort of validated to myself that maybe the boys really were just stupid back then. I marveled at how skinny I was when I thought I was fat (more on that in a future post, I think). I cringed through some failed relationships. But most of all, I did some unexpected mourning for my younger self, both the single 20-something version and as one half of a young married couple. No, I'm not old. I'm not even 40. But there is something that happens at some point--maybe from parental exhaustion or the realization that you are older than recollections of your parents at various stages--where you start to see your younger self as almost a different person, and long for the carefree moments, the optimism, and when life was just far more simple than it is right now. And I'm smart enough to know that those moments weren't all the picture makes them seem cracked up to be, and most of the time we wouldn't want to revisit those moments for more than a day or two at most. Life has never felt perfect, so surely there would be something I wouldn't want to deal with again. But certain parts of life weigh on us, and the thought of escaping the current weight, even for a little while and especially without guilt, sounds pretty nice. Impossible, of course, but nice.
Even still, looking through 14 years of your life (and knowing how much more came after that) makes you realize how much you've seen and done and had pass you by. You can't really recapture your youth, though many try...and sometimes I'm not sure I'd want to now that I have such a broader understanding of life and better empathy for others, among other things. This parenting experience has not been easy, but I can't deny all that it has taught me. I'm older and wiser, for sure. But I was caught off-guard by just how distanced I felt from younger me, even though some of those moments seemed like yesterday. I truly feel like having kids changed everything and creates a very clear dividing line between a life focused on me vs. a life focused on someone else. Looking at a whole group of pictures from before that turning point was a reminder that the "old" version of my life had some pretty great moments too.
It's been an interesting process and I can only imagine how much more emotional it will be if I do my parents' pictures! Stay tuned!
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