project life • documenting the negative

I choose not to document the negative in the family photo album because I don't treat the album as a daily journal. Unlike a lot of Project Lifers, I can only keep up with major events in our life and those events are usually something fun. I don't document the entire week at all. So, since it's not a daily thing, the natural ups and downs don't end up getting incorporated in my album, although I do see merit in documenting the hard stuff, although I keep that in my journal or in my own art journals and personal PL album. I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with incorporating the hard stuff. I am tackling a tough topic in a completely separate PL album next year, which is the death of my grandparents.

I've scrap booked for over 20 years, and only occasionally have I even alluded to some of the awful things life contains. I think that's because, when I began scrapbooking in high school, it was a lifeline to help me through a rough family upbringing. And that notion of celebrating the "good stuff" stuck with me, though I definitely covered the not-so-good stuff in my diary!

I'm spending 2014 going through my old scrapbooks and making them acid-free, and I've challenged myself to add a couple of more difficult stories to each year's album as I go.

And each month in 2014, for that year's album, I'm gonna sit down and do a BS-free check in with myself. I don't want to dwell on the difficulties of life, because that can become overwhelming when one is in recovery. But I do want to honor all aspects of my life, out of self-love. So each month in 2014 I'll ask myself if there are any important negative stories that I need to tell.I figure that will give me a chance to let it go if it wasn't important, and celebrate it too, if it was.

I am 100% with you, Rachel. I think that for us who use PL as a weekly photojournaling platform, including the negative things is incredibly important. After all, us weekly PL-ers are telling the story of an entire year week-by-week and excluding the negative things absolutely calls the integrity of the storyline into question.

This year has been particularly tough for me, and it seemed to grow tougher and tougher as the year went on (I can't wait for it to be over and for 2014 to be here) but I've never not included a tough moment in the album just because it is a tough moment. I may refrain from sharing that part of the album in my PL post for that week, but I don't refrain from excluding it from the story altogether. I'm not advocating dwelling on the negative, but pretending like the negative moments don't happen, or ignoring them, isn't healthy, either. ALL of life's experiences shape us and I personally think it's important to document that. After all, sometimes in the end it's the nitty-gritty moments; the tough moments; the negative moments and experiences, that yield the most positive of results or present us with the greatest of opportunities and somehow play a hand in creating some of those extra awesome moments we include in a week's spread without question or hesitation. And in those cases, what a shame it would be to not have the whole story accurately documented to reflect back upon.