Just who am I?

It’s curious to me that the older I get the more interested I am with just who I am.  I’m not talking family heritage – though that’s interesting – I’m talking about what makes me up.  What would people talk about at my funeral? What loves do I have right now? What do I enjoy and why? All these questions and so many more travel through my mind with army boots almost all the time.

Every vacation I’ve ever been on, I feel compelled to do everything I can in that location.  I’m not a beach layer. I can’t just sit on a beach for hours and do nothing. I have to be going, doing, seeing, photographing, documenting, etc.  This last trip to Victoria got me thinking about this too. Here’s what I figured out.

I don’t want to miss anything! Ever.  Sounds ridiculous I know. And I know I’ve missed things.  But while I am sitting on a beach sunning my pasty white self I’m constantly thinking about what else I could be seeing.  It’s not about being relaxed, because quite frankly, seeing all the sights is relaxing to me.

Then how do you remember all that you’ve done? For me it’s in my photos. I take a lot of photos.  I mean… A LOT. And my photos are of everything. Not just the tourist attractions, or the architecture, but of the food we eat, the places we stop for coffee, the train station I waited an hour for the wrong train in, the umbrella I had to buy because I forgot mine, the shoe string that broke and we laughed and laughed about it.  So many photos that mean something to mean.

Then I scrapbook them.

I started scrapbooking back in 1998.  My Aunt Jean is to blame 100% for this hobby of mine.  She brought a family scrapbook for us to see and I was blown away with how cool it was to see those photos.  To be able to tell the story about why you took that photo, to explain why the shoe lace was funny (even though it likely isn’t funny to anyone else).  I had an answer with how to document my life.  I was hooked.

I scrapbook for many reasons and these reasons have changed throughout the years. In the early years it was to document my life so that one day my children would look through my scrapbooks and be wow’d at the life their mom had before kids.  Or to show them their family heritage – who their grandparents were and details about them.  That need changed when I decided kids weren’t in the cards for me.

So then I struggled with why I scrapbook.  It can be an expensive hobby and really, why bother?

I go through phases of not caring anymore and thinking just putting the photos in an album would be just fine. Then I see some cool new paper that would fit a photo perfectly and the vicious circle starts all over again.

I’ve finally given myself permission to scrapbook just because it’s a creative outlet that I need.  Where will my scrapbooks end up when I’m dead? I really don’t care…I’ll be dead. Of course, they could bury them with me…. All 28 of them (current count).  I could leave them to some unsuspecting niece I suppose.  But at the end of the day, my scrapbooks are for me to enjoy now. 

I do occasionally pull them out to look through them. Or to try to remember what went on at a certain event.  I have a Sunday Dinner scrapbook that gets viewed at almost every Sunday dinner.  We all laugh and guffaw over whatever was funny that week.  Occasionally I’ll pull out a trip to show someone.  And of course, the 3Day scrapbooks go to every Getting Started Meeting to wow potential walkers into actually signing up.  (I know my scrapbooks help.)

So no one may care who I was when I’m dead, and no one may want to look through these years of scrapbooks I’ve done (BTW I’ve done all the way through my baby years to current…it’s frightening really).  But that’s okay, because I care.  I can look through them and smile at the life I’m living.  And lucky for you, my next project is to photograph ALL the pages.  You can bet your bottom dollar some will show up on this blog.