Flashback Friday: Writing Your Story One Week at a Time

 

Today’s Flashback Friday post is a little bit different. Rather than giving you an idea of something you should write about, I want to remind you of why it matters.

            This week I went through a stack of pictures my Mom had uncovered and saved for me to look through. (Family historian for the win, right?) I had seen some of them before but others were new to me, and I had the best time sorting through them. I saw pictures of people I hadn’t seen in years, and I saw pictures of people who looked so different from the way I remembered them in their later years.

            I saw pictures of myself from interesting hair eras and got some good laughs out of that. (Showed them to Ryan and thanked him for falling in love with me…eventually.)

            As I sorted through them, I started to remember specific things about the moments represented in the pictures. Seeing the details brought back memories of things not even pictured, and I enjoyed thinking about them.

            The pictures tell a story, and I’m so glad she kept them. Even though the story of the event wasn’t written, the collection of pictures told me about the day.

            Our pictures tell our stories. They preserve our stories. It’s easy to want to push pictures away because we don’t like who we were or how we looked, but all of those pieces and parts of our lives matter, because they made us who we are today. Do I want to go back to being the girl I was in those pictures? Not a chance. But do I appreciate the person she was and the person she grew into? Absolutely.

            So I encourage you to keep the pictures and keep the stories. They matter. You matter.