In the past three years, I’ve seen more live bands than I can count. I know because I just tried to count. Artists I’d been following for years, artists I barely knew, local bands, international travelers, from the backseats of sold-out arenas and from the couch in the attic above Matt’s garage.
In the past three years, I’ve formed nearly all of my closest friendships. In the past three years, we got a puppy. In the past three years, I’ve stood on coastlines and dove into the open ocean. I got my driver’s license, and then my sailing license. I spent a lot of one summer building a church in Bolivia, and all of the next summer photographing events like my town’s Fourth of July parade and every Friday-morning farmer’s market. I was in eight theater productions. I traveled with my family, with my classmates, and with my youth group. My youngest cousin was born, my oldest cousin got married. I dated a few boys. I fell in love with Frida Kahlo, and then with all of art history.
I graduated high school. I got into the college of my dreams, and finished my first semester at that college even more in love with it than when I started.
And I took pictures through it all. Sunset after sunset, and so many of the moments in-between.
And three years is a long time, especially when you’re trying to live the kind of life where you get to say “yes” to every possible adventure. It adds up fast, and phone storage is only so large. Last month, I had roughly 22,000 photos and videos on my phone. And I go through my camera roll fairly often to clear it of things I can bear to part with. It’s just that I take, like, actually hundreds of photos a week.
Over spring break, my phone started to slow down a lot. And then crawl to an actual stop. It got to a point where it wouldn’t even power on past the lock screen. Eventually, I was left with no choice but to reset my phone, clearing it of absolutely all its data from the past couple of years.
I know it sounds kind of silly, but I was kind of crushed at first. I thought about all the silly videos my best friend and I would make in between rehearsals, photos taken off of sailboat decks and out of helicopter windows, and that video from over the summer when my friends took guitars off the walls in a music store and played an impromptu acoustic version of one of their original songs. Moments I’d never in a million years be able to replicate, and now also wasn’t able to look back on, either. A modern-day disaster.
I got frustrated enough in the middle of needing to erase my phone entirely that I needed to give up for a bit and jump in the shower to get a break from staring at the same loading bar for minutes on end. And then, in the middle of sulking to myself under the running water, I realized something: the song my friends played at the music store was playing in my head. I could still see them sitting among the rows of guitars in my mind.
I put so much of myself into the photos I take. They’ve always seemed like such an easy way to time-travel, glimpses into the past, the best way to truly immortalize a moment. Losing all the photos I’d taken in the past three years really did feel like I was losing parts of me, furthering my connection to all of the moments I’d wanted to remember.
It’s almost foolish that it took me this long to realize that my identity doesn’t come from my photography. Of course, it’s such a major part of who I am, but the pictures I take are not what shape who I am. What shapes who I am are the experiences that I remember in my photos, not the images themselves. Just because I don’t have photos anymore of adventures I’ve gone on and shorelines I’ve seen and people I’ve met don’t invalidate those memories at all, and the memories are what I carry with me, regardless of whether or not I have a tangible version of those memories.
The very next day after my phone erased, I took the train into Chicago. I’ve been living in this city almost my whole life and The Bean in Millennium Park still hasn’t lost its novelty. I’ve seen Sunday on La Grande Jatte at The Art Institute time after time and it still blows my mind that the artist filled a canvas that enormous with so many thousand tiny little dots to make a painting so beautiful. In the two weeks since then, I’ve finally gotten up to the Willis Tower Skydeck and seen my own city at an angle that almost seems like it should be impossible. In the two weeks since then I’ve been to a concert and I’ve performed in a play, I’ve explored new areas of new cities and new areas of familiar towns, I’ve learned new words, I’ve walked a garden that could have come out of a fairytale and wandered a four-story antique shop, I’ve driven with the windows down, I’ve sung at the top of my lungs, I’ve had my fill of vanilla lattes, and every single evening the sun has set. I’ve even snapped shots of a few of them.
Life continues. More photos will be taken. More photos might be lost. That’s fine. All that does is create space to never stop saving images, either in SD cards or in hearts. And it’s almost even more exciting to know that now neither of those things are anywhere close to full capacity.
Image credits: Annmarie Morrison