In defence of physical media

Write it down

If recent events have told us anything, it’s the fragility of the online world. We exist only in the tangible, on the pen touching the paper, on the photo held between a thumb and a forefinger.

The message is clear; record your life!!

When I was at home over the holidays, my mum dragged down the suitcase she keeps of my brother and I’s baby clothes and books. I sat on the floor of my bedroom reading the words my mum wrote in my baby book about how nervous she was to meet me and how smiley my brother was when he was just a few months old.

My heart broke a little, and I wish I could have met my mum before she was a mother. Before that’s how she would be forever defined. She was a girl once, with a wonky haircut and scraped knees. I wish I knew the woman that existed inside my mum.

I’m so glad for the little glimpse into her that I have in our belongings, even when they grow faded and old. Her blue inky handwriting in my baby book and her squealing laughter on the old VHS tapes my granny gave her. She was such a bright child.

A lot of her belongings were lost in a housefire, so I’m grateful for the memories she does have. My heart swells when we watch the tapes and she says ‘I forgot about that!’ and I wonder how it feels to meet yourself again. To learn the little girl you were in front of the little girl you created.

I own some of her clothes, things she wore in her 20s as a young mother. I wear them in my 20s too and wonder where she was. I think often of when she wore them and who she was and what she felt. I wonder if they were the same things I feel now.

I think a lot of my sentimentality comes from my dad. He has a box of the keyring collection he had as a little boy. It’s so heavy and the metal is rusted but his smile is bright when he thumbs the metal. I have his old biology workbooks purely because I love the drawings he made in the back of them, when he was a boy and not a dad.

His favourite mug is still the ‘top dad’ one I gifted him ten years ago. I make him tea in it now and I can carry it with one hand. I wonder if he notices how much my palm has grown around it.

My first pair of shoes, little pink trainers, are framed in his living room. My name is tattooed on his arm, accompanied with a pink star for his first girl. Every school book I ever wrote in lives in a box in the shed. The archive of my education. We look through them sometimes and I watch my passions change.

His life is a scrapbook of the person he was and is and the person I was and am and of all his traits, I’m grateful to have inherited this.

Every tattoo on my arm tells a story and I like to think of myself as a form of scrapbook, just in case my physical one is lost. The sunflower that reminds me of my favourite advice and the tile that reminds me of my study abroad. It’s all so special.

I started a scrapbook when I was 18, dedicated to my years of high school. Sometimes it makes my stomach churn to look back and remember, but I equally loathe to forget. I wonder if I’ll have children and they’ll know me better for the things I’ve left of my life. The footprints I’ve marked with stickers and photos and paint markers.

In my second scrapbook, I turned 18 and got results that would determine my education. I printed off acceptance emails and congratulatory messages. I like to look back at them and remember the people that believed in me. The people that still do.

My third scrapbook documents my study abroad. It’s filled with business cards from taco places (I met Beanie Feldstein in one!), wristbands from festivals, dolphin leaflets from the Algarve. It documents the friendship that absolutely blossomed between my best friend and I. It’s almost a year since we moved there together and maybe I’ll force her to look through my scrapbook just to commemorate it. It pads out my memory with details long forgotten, never quite captured on a phone screen. It reminds me that I lived a life instead of a memory.

We’ll share some wine and laugh about the airport transfer that we both forgot about, the cat that tried to steal my cake, and the time the waiter at our favourite brunch spot memorised our orders.

It started when I was a little girl, I think. I made collages on pink paper that I could take in to show everyone at school. I’d haphazardly tape shells I collected from the beach and pictures from the airshow I attended every summer. My handwriting was sloppy, each letter a different size. I run my finger over the faded pencil and I miss the girl that made her mark.

I graduated to typing when I was older. I wrote extended stories about my summer holidays and proudly showed them to my teachers. I don’t think they ever really wanted to read them, but I appreciate that they pretended to.

When I understood the concept of oversharing, I moved to a journal. My thoughts were much more at home there. I try so hard every January to be consistent, pretending I’ll write every evening. I want to document the good and the bad. I know I’ll fail.

I turn to my journal when the words can’t help but spill out, when it’s too much to carry. I write when I feel like there’s nothing else I can do, and I cringe when I think of my best friend seeing my open journal when she hugged me in her dressing gown.

I wonder if I’ll ever read back over my journals when I’m more of an adult than I pretend to be now. I wonder if I’ll remember that I only wrote the bad days, or if I’ll forget that any other kind of day existed. I wonder if my future children will read it and wonder why their mum was so dramatic.

I know they’ll never get to meet me now, but maybe in a decade or two they’ll run their little fingers over the ink I bleed and feel me in the letters I’m writing. I wonder if they’ll miss the woman they didn’t meet in the way I miss my mum.