Preserving the Past Part 3: Post-Graduation Travels in the USA

The intent of this little series has always been to reflect on my obsession with preserving the past, which I’ve always gone about in the same basic way: externalizing the memory in a physical form of some kind. Usually it’s something creative and crafty, but sometimes it’s just a simple keepsake from the period I want to preserve. These objects become more than just themselves. They become the embodiment of the time period they’re from.

In the first post, I wrote about the scrapbooks I made at the age of 11. In the second, I wrote about the photos I took at the age of 16. What interested me in retrospect is that both of these instances of obsessive record-keeping came just before periods of big transition in my life.

The first: it was 2004 and I was leaving Primary School.

The second: it was 2009 and I was leaving Secondary School.

In both cases I was fearful of imminent change and sentimental about the life I was leaving behind. When I finished college in 2011 and university in 2014, however, I didn’t feel this same urge to commemorate my time. I had no social life at either of these places, and so nothing that could be documented. The camera I’d taken so many pictures with during my last year of school remained unused after I left. College and university were…