If you know me you probably know that being friends with me means expecting a camera shoved in your face at any given time, if you follow me on Snapchat you know that I can’t hang out with someone without there being photographical evidence (and hours of it), and if by chance we’re Facebook friends you may know that if there was any sort of event in my life there will be at least 30 pictures to prove it within 24 hours.
So if I have ever overwhelmed you with my need to pull out the camera, sorry, but I’m really not sorry at all.
So many times have people made [what they think are] subtle comments about my social media use and how ‘obsessed’ I am with pictures, asking things like if I really had fun or if I was just taking photos the entire time, even going as far as to question my ability to experience something without feeling the need to document it. I’ve heard these comments more times than I can count, and yet they almost always seem to leave me disheartened.
It genuinely baffles me to hear someone say, “put down the camera”, because if I put this camera down, the moment is lost. Sure, for a period of time we will remember that car ride when that girl sang the wrong lyric confidently enough that it made you laugh so hard your abs hurt for a week, or the time the Starbucks barista misspelled your name so bad you questioned whether or not they actually tried to misspell it, or even that day you went to the gym with your best friend and ended up just dancing in the empty studio room for an hour and a half to High School Musical songs and then leaving to go eat burgers and fries. But those perfect little memories fade and they’re replaced by the "bigger” ones like packing for college or going to your first date party, and by the time the next big moment rolls around you’ve completely forgotten about that car ride, Starbucks order, and “gym session”. Those little moments are lost, with nothing to rememberh moved on from these easy care-free days. We will have jobs in tall concrete buildings, busy mornings filled with packing lunches and rushing to the bus stop, and the stress of actually needing to know about taxes. Days at a time will begin to blur together and you’ll turn on autopilot and go through the motions of trying to keep everything, including yourself, together.
And then there will be a moment.
A moment where your little girl is belting out her favorite princess songs on the way to the bus stop with all the right sounds but none of the right words and you’ll think back to that girl who made your abs hurt because she sang the lyrics at the top of her lungs too.
A moment where you’ll be sitting in your concrete office building and your boss will call you “Joe” when your name is “John” and you’ll think back to that time when it was just the girl behind the counter at Starbucks who confidently got your name wrong.
A moment where you wake up in the morning dreading the fact that you have to go to the gym to maintain your aging body and you’ll think back to when it wasn’t working out you did at the gym but instead dance to High School Musical songs.
It’ll be the seemingly unimportant moments, the ones where you were just living, not doing anything particularly memorable, but just living, that will come to your mind. And right then, in that moment, you’ll wish so badly that you could remember the face of the girl who got the lyrics wrong, or the way the Starbucks barista misspelled your simple name, or the terrible dance moves you showed off that day at the gym.
The reason I stick a camera in my friends face in the middle of a conversation, or post a 3 hour long snapchat story of getting coffee with a friend, or add 120 photos to Facebook after going out just one night, is not because I want all of you people out there to know everything I do with my life. It is because when the time comes and I am reminded of all those easy care-free days, I will be so beyond grateful that I never put my camera down.
