Recent Posts

20/05/2016

Week in the Life | May 2016

Most people participated in Week in the Life (WITL) last week (May 9-15) along with Ali Edwards. Today I'm sharing my thoughts on the project, as I finish up the last few days of documenting my week. For more details on the project you can visit Ali's blog (here). I warn you that this post is very word heavy, so you can skip reading it if you want, and I'll be back on Monday with a Project Life spread.

First, I'd like to just say that I rarely get this open on my blog, but given that my word for this year is Brave, and that means being vulnerable at times, I've decided that I need to share this. Though a lot of it may be written and edited out.

When I woke up on the week everyone else was doing WITL I basically forgot until halfway through the morning. Not much had happened (made coffee, watched something from the PVR) that couldn't be written about, if a delayed photo wasn't taken. I took some photos through the rest of the morning, but they were all forced. I wasn't excited about the project and the level of resistance I felt to documenting the week was immensely overwhelming. I gave up, or quit, or however you want to look at it. Through the rest of the day I thought "I could be okay with documenting the week starting on Tuesday. This whole starting on Sunday or Monday nonsense is just because people want their week to stay together. Or I could start on Friday because it's my work Monday." But because we were taking a trip over the weekend I decided to just start it the following week on Monday.

Our weekend trip was amazing; we went to the city to celebrate 4 years of being weird together. We saw some friends, ate some delicious food and found time to lay around in the hotel and just relax. I made a mini album from the trip that I'll be sharing here later on. It felt like the perfect recharge before documenting an entire week of mundane details in our life.

Then Monday morning came around. I still felt traces of the resistance I experienced the week before. It wasn't an overwhelming amount of resistance that made me just want to stay in bed and leave my phone out of arms reach, but still slight resistance. Then I took some photos. My pictures aren't perfect, they show our messy house and things that I might not want to remember in the future, but they're an accurate depiction of our life right now.

I took some inspiration from Ali's 2014 album opening (here) and wrote out a short reason why, and some stats about us right now. I didn't consult Jon on the things I wrote about him, but made observations about what he's been doing right now and included those.

My reason why card says "We're both a little weird, and we love that about each other. Jon doesn't understand why I'm documenting the little details of our life, like when I do the dishes, or he forgets to take out the trash. These little mundane details make up this season of our life, and they're worth remembering. He forgets to take out the trash because he's been working almost every day for the last few months. I'm usually the one who does the dishes because it's easier than telling Jon he's not doing it the way I would do it. This is the realness of our life, and I want to remember it."

After I wrote that last night and printed it onto a card and got a little crafty with my album, something changed in my attitude towards the project. I decided that I don't care if my photos for each day are exactly the same. That's my life. We don't have kids, we work a lot and when we're not working, we watch a lot of TV we don't have time for otherwise. I'm telling our story and it might not be interesting in the slightest to anyone but us, but it's still worth documenting. Your story is important too, even if no one cares about it's details but you.

Have a wonderful weekend. If you made it this far thank you for reading my ramblings. I promise not to have too many posts like this, I just needed to get some things out of my head and written somewhere. Even if no one is interested in them.

0 comments:

Post a Comment