I’m a self-confessed hoarder. I am my mother’s daughter; the jokes my dad and I used to make with a glance at each other and a roll of our eyes started to make more and more sense with each passing year as an adult. Floating between terraced houses with bedrooms in the front window, new-build flats with rotting wood balconies, metal storage units a forty-minute drive away from anywhere, I have quickly realised just how materialistic I am; it’s hard to ignore the fact that you’re moving 20 boxes of clothes when you have to pack, unpack, pack, unpack, repeat for your entire early-to-mid twenties.
Clothes for every occasion: summer, winter, British summer, smart casual, super casual, going out (slutty), going out (less slutty), interviews, drinks in the Northern Quarter, drinks in Deansgate, concert (seated), concert (in the pit). Birthdays, funerals, graduation, the only hen do you’ve ever been invited to, the first wedding you’ve attended, the future weddings you have yet to be invited to. Attending therapy, running errands, walking the dog, hiding away, catching the train, short-haul flight, long-haul flight, Christmas parties.
I had a fascination with analogue photography when I was around 14; I can at least partially attribute this to the game Life Is Strange, where the protagonist is virtually never seen without a vintage Polaroid camera around her neck. In an attempt to refine my hobbies from simply ‘art’ to a set discipline - and somewhat of a pandering to Tumblr aestheticism of the early 2010’s - I bought a Supercolor 635 from a seller on eBay, who signed off all of their sentences with an exclamation mark, and who posted it the same day for me to hold in my desperate grasp the next. Failing to do my research beforehand in a pure act of teenage impulsivity caught up to me, and whilst I had the satisfaction of 600 grams of plastic sat in my hand, I had no way of using it, as the battery to power the camera is contained in each film pack.
I spent two weeks waiting for a sleeve of Type-600 film to arrive, shipped from the Dutch headquarters of who would eventually become the new Polaroid company, and after loading the film and fiddling with the controls, I took my first ever analogue photograph: my dog in the garden, a patch of flattened grass beneath her where she’d lay for hours, enjoying the sun.
Coco was a gorgeous orange-roan Cocker Spaniel. She lived to the ripe age of 13 with no sight, the canine equivalent of anxiety, a family that (mostly) adored her, and a tense relationship with my dad, the spite from which I’m sure was the only thing to get her to the age that she passed at. I’d had the photo of her pinned to my bedroom wall, gradually being surrounded by glowing clusters of memories as I lived through turbulent teenage years and the uncertainty of a failed first year at university. When my parents eventually moved, I collected all of my photographs and started to journal with them.
Train tickets as backgrounds, itemised lines on receipts underlining my sentences, a sticker given to me by the assistant at the Vans store pasted in to remind me what I did that day. I enjoyed keeping a record of things that I did, even if nobody would see them but me; it gave me a sense of satisfaction that tapped into my creative urges, urges that are usually only fed by creating something from nothing. By taking an art-based subject at university, I’d managed to kill off the motivation to produce anything outside of my coursework, and subsequently gave up on my analogue photography and illustration that had occupied most of my evenings as a teenager. By scrapbooking, using pre-existing bits of nothing that bore some relevance to my day, I was finally able to create something remotely artistic in a way that didn’t require the initial inspiration + motivation combination that art school had beaten out of me.
I wrote letters to friends in other cities, other countries, even, and sent them small tokens of my life, for them to stick into their own journals so that I could still be effortlessly woven into their days despite our conversations being solely based on iMessage games and Twitter DMs. The virtual memories - screenshots, or stupid pictures that became memetic in our talks - however sentimental, however beautiful, felt like they could all slip away from me in an instant, hours of outpourings of adoration fizzling into cyberspace as if the words held no weight. I love physical contact, hugs, shared experiences - and it’s difficult to have that when you see each other once a year. Whereas taking a photo on a disposable camera during that annual meet and posting it to your best friend in a hand-decorated frame two weeks later? That feels real; the friendship is tangible, I am holding parts of our love in my two hands.
Part of my course of therapy involved my therapist writing a letter to me about what she’d learned during our time together, and I would write back to her about how I felt I’d grown and what I was going to do once our time was over. I’d already anticipated it being difficult due to the nature of what we’d spoken about and the entire reason I was in therapy in the first place, but when she began to read details of my own trauma back to me, I remember crying so hard that our session ran over before I could speak.
Something about holding a copy of the letter in my hands - containing everything that was Wrong with me, everything that I was pushing away and intentionally not thinking about, everything that has Happened - made all of it feel too real to me. Somehow, texting friends details of events or even verbalising it didn’t phase me; I have built such a disconnect between my thoughts and the words leaving my mouth (or being tapped into a message punctuated with ‘lol’ and ‘lmao’ to soften the hit) that reading letters on paper forming the words of what had happened to me was the only way that it was able to sink in enough for me to address it properly.
I spoke at length with my therapist about this. I didn’t understand it myself, really, because it didn’t make sense that I could joke about my mental health but seeing it on paper suddenly made it Real. I described it as an ‘orb of negative vibes’ (jokingly - again, a response from always trying to dampen my sentences with verbal wet cloth as if it would remove the very real emotion underlying) and it being in the room with us as a physical object felt heavier. Verbal communication meant nothing: the words would leave my lips, fresh, newly-formed, and hang around just long enough to reach my poor therapist’s ear, and then they would vanish once more into Nothingness. There existed no tangible aspect of what I was saying, just particles of speech that existed for a singular moment in time. But this? These words - Times New Roman, 12pt, 0.75 spacing, A4 paper - felt different. There were Real features that carried them all the way from the psychiatric unit printer to my eyes on a Thursday afternoon. I could read the same sentence over and over and over, and it would still exist not only in memory, but on this 210mm-by-297mm sheet, as opposed to disappearing like spores on a dandelion as soon as I’d finished speaking.
Retaining the physicality of pretty much anything, I discovered, is my preferred method of collecting memories.
A letter from my best friend, complete with a confetti-filled envelope and looped pink gel pen handwriting: Our relationship, although still filled with sister-like adoration, existed only on the digital plane. It’s not like I didn’t feel the love pouring from my screen with every message, or that I struggled to make my texts feel genuine, but receiving a hand-written letter felt special. She’d found the prettiest paper, decorated on the borders, and filled every row with the most delicate of lettering, glistening pink as the paper creased in my fingers.
“I love you to the ends of the earth and back,” she writes. “I always will!”
---
A photograph, taken from the front row of a 20,000-capacity gig of one of my favourite artists, developed from a cheap disposable camera a month after the fact: With analogue photography, assuming you’re not doing a specific shoot, is based on the moment. For me, the recalling of the experience based on the moment in the photograph is part of the appeal, regardless of whether the photo is technically good. Whatever moment I’d chosen to capture got to keep itself tucked inside a 6-by-4 rectangle of glossy paper - a split second that I’d thought was so special whilst experiencing it that I decided to immortalise it. The whole memory would be contained in that photo for me; a flipbook of miniscule memories of a particular day and time played back behind my eyes.
I look at my disposable camera photography from the gig as soon as the guy at the development lab hands the folder to me. Over half of the shots are so blurry or poorly lit that even I can’t tell what was happening. But two or three good shots, even at a glance, bring the whole night back into my head. I see the lighting change for this particular song, the moment captured as the frontman for the band moves closer to the front of the stage. I feel my friend grab my shoulder in both eager anticipation and surprise; we have a brief verbal exchange of our excitement for the next song once the instrumental breaks through the arena. I take one singular shot, operating under a ‘if it works, it does; if not, oh well’ mentality before letting my camera dangle from my neck again. We sing too loudly; the others next to us at the metal barricade watch the vocalist perform not in the flesh, but through their screens, hoping for a one-off moment that would make for a popular tweet. I cling onto my friend’s hand and our palms slide together from the sweat, I tell her I love her and she tells me she loves me back.
---
A paper ticket for the Amsterdam tram network, long since expired: At 16, I ended up spending a week with my mom in Amsterdam after the end of my current relationship led to an awkward abandoned holiday collecting dust in my emails. After spending all of my evenings working minimum wage alone in the back of a Nisa Local to pay it off, we decided it was too much to waste and went together as a mother-daughter bonding experience. Aside from the post-breakup depression that sunk in - and was inevitable, really, considering I was supposed to be sharing this apartment with her, taking photographs and eating vegan waffles with her, falling more in love with her; a sentiment that never left my side throughout the holiday - it was a wonderful time, and I cherished the time that I got to spend with my mom with my impending move to university approaching.
I found my disposable camera from that trip three years later, and developed the whole reel to discover that half of it contained those same loving, brief moments of my relationship that I kept chasing later on in life to store away in a print photograph. They sit untouched, in the same folder that I collected the prints in. The photos from Amsterdam - of my mom and I visiting an improv comedy show, by the rich foliage-laden canals, and posing with a 6ft plastic penis in the Sexmuseum - are pinned next to a paper tram ticket (that ate up the last of our holiday funds but got us to the Van Gogh Museum) in the front cover of my journal.
I remember crying upon reaching the final room of the Van Gogh Museum, reading about his unfinished paintings that sat alone after his death. Sometimes, when I open my journal to see my beautiful mother looking back at me, I’m reminded of that moment, but instead of the hug she gave me and the warm, incomparable feel of love wrapped tightly around me.
Given how evocative positive physical memories can be, it makes sense that the same response occurs for negative ones, too, no matter how glazed over my eyes are when reading the letter from my therapist. But giving these events a space to exist in our realm - on an NHS-branded letter, or tucked away in biro scrawls in a diary - helps me to externalise a lot of the feelings surrounding them. They’ve been given a set place to Be, of which I control; they’ll stay there until I decide otherwise, and I finally have my own say in at least one aspect of An Event. Similarly to deciding when the ideal moment to take a photograph is, or opting to display the BHX → AMS plane ticket in my journal as opposed to the return journey; the control of the memory feels within my grasp. Although it’s admittedly not as easy to make some of them disappear within my brain signals as it would be to shred a piece of paper into hundreds of miniscule ink-splattered remains, the sentiment is not lost on me. It never is.
I fold the paper in two and set it down on my dining table at home, two hours after my therapy session. A breeze lets itself in through an open window, dancing delicately with my letter for a moment before settling it onto the floor like a discarded bill. I pick it back up and position it exactly as before, this time weighted by a pen, because I am in control.