The importance of documenting your life

Losing my memory is one of my greatest fears.

Thank you for reading Everything is Liminal. P.S. Scroll down for a video❣️

Digital collage of (toddler) me and my grandmother watching my kids

I know almost nothing about my grandmother, even though she was the one who raised me for two years when my mom left for America when I was a year old. When I travelled back to Korea for the first time since I was 10 this Spring, I was repeatedly told how much I cried as a toddler from every single relative I met who hadn’t seen me in 30 years.

My family history is a mystery, shrouded in protective layers from a painful past. I read novels set in 1920s Korea to imagine the possible life my grandmother might have had living under Japanese colonial rule. When she arrived in the U.S. in 1976 just three years after my own arrival, we acted like strangers at first, our language and cultural barriers already rivers wide. It prevented us from having deep conversations other than the most basic exchanges of dialogue, but we communicated mostly through the language of food.

What I do know about her past is that she was uneducated, but I saw glimpses of a hidden artistic talent when we would draw together at the table. She would use my crayons to make me drawings conjured from her memories of Korea, depicting childhood scenes dressed in hanboks, playing on swings with other girls or skipping across rocky streams. From my grandmother, I inherited my talent for art. I pass this down to the next generation to my daughter.

This is why I document my life—in photos, in words, in video. Because I don’t know where I came from and I don’t want my kids to wonder the same. I mourn all the lost stories that my grandmother took to her grave, stories that could have helped me understand world history and the human condition through the context of my own family history.

I’ve written here nearly every week for a year now. When I’m feeling insecure, I wonder why I share them with anyone, but then I remember that words on a page can help us feel like we’re not alone. I see proof of that in the comments I read and the ones that I leave on other writers’ newsletters every week. In a world where distinguishing between stories written by human or computer becomes increasingly difficult, I cling to the genuine connection I feel when reading the words written by a real person I’ve never met, thousands of miles away.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I am deathly afraid of losing my memory given my Dad’s battle with Alzheimers. Like my grandmother, I know very little about his childhood. I weave together fragments pulled from photographs kept in a shoebox full of other black and white pictures that are a mystery: a single photo of him in his time in the Korean army; a peek at a curious doorway that he poses in front of. Unlike my grandmother, however, our inability to communicate anything deeper than superficial conversation wasn’t rooted in a barrier of language. The roots twist deeper from a generational thread of not knowing how to really love.

In his last year of life, I watched him search in the deepest recesses of his memory as he struggled to remember the most mundane things. As someone who finds great comfort in nostalgia and memories, losing the ability to remember is one of my greatest fears. To watch it slowly happen to someone right in front of me cements the reality that not only is this something that is entirely possible, but I may even be genetically predisposed to it.

This is why I document life. Because even if I escape this disease—and I remind myself that the odds are in my favor—my memory will naturally dull one day. It already has. I keep my 6,958 page blog on three hard drives for my children as an archive of their childhood years. I have regrets that I don’t have more photos of my own youth. There is a twenty year black hole from my teenage years to my twenties, a period of time that were my wildest years in life. I can only rely on what I can still remember to remind me of the adventures that I had and the person I once was.

This is why I try to take more photos of myself today, despite my deep aversion to it. I don’t often like the image that stares back at me. I see the unevenness in my body and gait from my childhood scoliosis, and the subtle traces of facial asymmetry left behind from my more recent bout with Bells Palsy. But I know one day I will want these pictures when I’m older to admire how young I was. My children will want them too.

I looked back on the year through videos I took on my phone last week—over 2000 short clips—and condensed them into a little film. My year in 2 1/2 minutes. I didn’t make it for YouTube views, but in wanting to learn how to tell stories in motion this year, I’m really happy with how the editing on this one turned out.

It was really only through this reflection that I was reminded how big 2023 was: the start of a weekly writing habit, transitioning out of a career, a life-changing trip. But perhaps the biggest surprise of all, were the happy smiles that I found buried in all the footage on my camera roll that I couldn’t see from the tiny thumbnails on my phone. There was real joy in 2023—something that was missing in recent years.

I share it below (always best with sound on 🎼).

We have 11 days left in the year. I wish I can say we’re relaxing for the rest of it, but we’ve got a kid pushing through her college application deadlines down to the wire. Yeeeeah, so things are a bit tense around here and I’ll be skipping next week’s newsletter. Wish us luck. I wish you a peaceful holiday and I’ll meet you back here in January.

Before I sign off for the year, I want to express how much gratitude I feel for you all. It has been an honor to land in your inbox every single week.

I’ll see you on the other side of 2023.
-Jenna