the art of personal archiving

for who will remember my story if not me?

from @aveemei, taken from my friend C’s are.na channel

Once Upon A Time (From “Undertale”) (LoFi Version) · Collosia

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Being back home reminds me of how much stuff I have. 20+ years of accumulated memorabilia, stuffed in boxes under beds and adorned on the walls of my childhood bedroom. Every time I try to get rid of something, it just goes into the storage room.¹ Out of sight, out of mind right? Papers I’ve wanted to shred, shelved away “for later.” Clothes I wanted to donate, sitting in a pile, “discarded” but it’s still there. The memories are still there. They linger, they creep.

What is the purpose of nostalgia? Of sentimentality? Why remember the good times? The not-so-good times? Is there a merit to making these things physical, tangible? Does digital documenting provide the same value as physical archiving?

I would consider myself a hoarder. When I was younger, I felt this term was insulting. To own many things, to hold onto them and not want to let go, to me signalled you didn’t have the capacity to let go. I had an extreme minimalist phase around when Marie Kondo first started becoming popular. I owned clothes painted only in blacks, whites, greys; I had next to nothing in my room, ruthlessly discarded many of my clothes, digitized everything, discarded old school assignments. Being a hoarder was the last thing I wanted to be.

But as I’ve grown older, moved around, and more or less spent the last 4 years of my life living out of belongings I could only fit in a checked luggage, I’ve begun to appreciate the art of hoarding; the art of personal archiving.

When I’m able to build up a collection of something, anything; when I have the storage space to be able to collect things, it’s truly a privilege. To me, it’s a sign of “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.” It makes it harder to move. And that delights me. I’ve lived much of my formative adult years feeling constantly in transit. Never wanting to fully decorate my room because I know I’ll leave it in 4 months. Never feeling like there’s any one place I can call home. I talk about this in yearning for permanence.

tweeted on october 23, 2024

Sometime during this extreme minimalist phase, I found a box of my old elementary assignments and I’m pretty sure I discarded it all. But looking back, I regret it. There is no way I can ever restore them. There is no archive of those years - what did I even do then? What did I make of myself? What were my hopes and dreams? I’m particularly regretful over my fifth grade ‘bucket list’ book, where I listed dreams I had hoped to achieve at each age. I would’ve loved to know what I yearned for at that age.²

Documenting and archiving your life is a research project. It’s a reference library, a way to understand yourself better. If we study the history of others to understand what patterns will repeat and predict the future, imagine how powerful we could be when we come to understand ourselves in the same way?

If I am my only proof of my history, who else is going to document and restore it but me? Who else is going to be a historian of my life? I would like to write my own history books. I want to preserve everything as crisp as I can, I don’t want the years to go by without knowing what made it. My home is a living museum featuring the history of me.

Of course, process is something I’ve always struggled with. I think a failure mode of not documenting more in the past is having too much indecision surrounding how I should document. Do I put these postcards on the wall, in a photo album, or in a scrapbook? Should I order these chronologically or by theme? How do I want to save or preserve this artifact?

I once again feel a pressure to document things so that they are easy to move later. If I contain them in vessels like photo albums and scrapbooks, I can just transport them with ease instead of having to take down a bunch of pictures from walls. But that also means they never get seen unless I intentionally look for them, which is rare. They get lost, tucked away in a book cover. I don’t entirely know what the solution should be here, but I’ll experiment until I get there.

a snapshot of my calendar in 2019, the historians here will find i spent my last summer of senior year (high school) working multiple part-time jobs to fund university, partook in graphic design freelance course led by dawn lee, which led me to talk to youtubers i admired like muchelleb just by cold emailing. it seems i was also attempting a dailyUI challenge at the time (spoiler, i likely failed after a week)

The longest form of archiving relationship I have with myself that has been the most consistent over time is the relationship I have with my calendar. For the last 6 years I’ve more or less kept a documentation of what I was going to do with my time, which is not necessarily an indicator of what I actually did, but does leave more clues than nothing, especially when it comes to certain events or meetings that were fixed. Next to this is probably journals I’ve kept, though they’ve been inconsistent they’ve existed since earlier days like high school. Stickers on my old laptops also serve as documentation, but they’re long gone now. On my door, I have postcards and posters from my 2023 travels. I’ve used digital counterparts like Notion, the G Suite, various to-do apps, mymind, various other spatial interface knowledge management tools, presently are.na. I use Figma to make digital scrapbooks from time to time, mostly for travels or big moments.

I really admire my friend C who has spent some time now scanning many moments of her early years in an effort to preserve them. I would say her part-time job is scanning, she spends hours on end doing it. For as long as I’ve known her she’s always been a big archivist. It inspires me to want to carefully preserve everything too, to put so much care in to sweating the small stuff, especially the early years you might not remember or deem as important. I had the privilege of reading some entries from the elementary journals she scanned, and I think they reveal so much about the kind of person you were and the things that led to your growth, if not also a source of whimsical entertainment.

I still don’t really have a process. I would like to make an attempt at having one. I would like to make it easy for me to preserve anything, to not have to think too hard about the medium or else the items will see darkness far longer than they will see light.

Some 2025 archiving aspirations:

1. Every day-to-day pieces of ‘junk’ accumulated (receipts, stickers, stamps) goes into the Main Scrapbook³

2. Only my favourite photos on the wall, everything else goes into photo albums

3. Collected postcards make for gifts or decoration only if I really like the design, otherwise they go in a postcard album (I now must acquire a postcard album)

4. For digital scrapbook posts (on my private Instagram, apologies), try to make them as soon as possible from the event the media is derived from. I find the longer I wait, the harder it is for me to produce.

5. Don’t think too hard about how to lay things out or make them pretty. Overlap things if you need to. Glue, tape, sew, do whatever it takes to make sure the memories go somewhere. Far too often I’m left with bits and bobs that go un-documented, the barrier I need to get over is perfectionism.

6. Just spend the extra dollars on display cases or storage dividers if you need a home for trinkets or collected items. Repurpose first if possible.

some scrapbooking inspo, from pinterest

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life roundup 𐙚₊˚⊹

the easiest parts of my newsletter to write for me is always this section, because i sort of just yap with no edits, just raw rambles that may end up being quite long but is a good glimpse at how my brain works. sometimes it ends up being longer than the actual post and i’m a bit embarrassed by that tbh. enjoy

• since my last post, i really did feel like everyday was a day where my mind was clear. i squeezed out as much volleyball as i could before i had to leave on my trip, i watched design videos while i ate, i read in the mornings, i went to cafes.

• i travelled to europe for the first time and it wasn’t as magical as i had dreamed it to be. not that anything was bad, i just wasn’t particularly struck with awe the way i was when i first landed in korea or japan. i don’t know how much of this can be attributed to less novelty from having experienced what it’s like to travel abroad, or the fact the weather was gloomy bc of winter, or simply due to lifestyle preferences and the fact that i really do like asian countries better than european. anywho, i went to lisbon, paris, strasbourg, and london, and i think strasbourg was my favourite alongside lisbon! everything i ate was really yummy, the architecture was beautiful, and i had fun with my friends (the 20k steps a day was rough though)

• i came home from a 10 hour flight that was delayed by 3 hours (2 of which i was stuck on the plane for), with an 8-hour time difference to Vancouver, and yet upon landing the first thing I did was go play volleyball with my brothers. The moment I got home I got ready and left within 15 minutes to make it to an 8:30pm game and played until 10:30pm. By the time I finished it was equivalent to 5/6am UK time and I was utterly exhausted, but it seems I will do anything for volleyball.

• ever since coming home, I’ve felt stagnant. I cannot tell how much of this is attributed to post-travel fatigue/jetlag, the holiday season, or simply being back in my childhood bedroom in Vancouver. I’ve felt this way about Vancouver for the last three years, and I don’t know how to shake it. I have come to realize that maybe I’m just lonely in Vancouver. all my friends I’ve come to know and love are mostly in Toronto, and while I do have friends dear to me in Vancouver, it’s not the same feeling. I don’t randomly bump into them on the streets and we don’t have spontaneous hangouts; there’s a lack of events or overall recurring situations where I’d see my friends. While my family bucket is definitely filled and overflowing, everything else seems lacking. I miss my friends, I miss volleyball, I miss Toronto. The thing is, when I’m in Toronto for two weeks it feels like four months in the best possible way, that I’m able to engage in so much that my time feels compressed. When I’m in Vancouver for two weeks, it feels like three years in the sense I feel like it’s been forever and I’m ready to leave. This has more to do with living at home than Vancouver as a whole, though.

• it is a new year tomorrow and i wake a little teary-eyed. 2024 was really good to me, when i thought nothing could top my 2023. i can only hope the best for 2025, as well as embrace how i do not need to outdo myself every year. how can i? how can i possibly compare 2024 to 2023, 2023 to 2022, when who i was and the circumstances of my situations were so different? when every loss was helping me take a step towards every win? in that sense, i don’t hope for better. i only hope for alignment with what i believe to be true to reach my biggest and brightest dreams.

• in 2024 my word for the year was iridescent. in 2025, i want to be electric.

media i’ve been loving╰(*´︶`*)╯♡

• k-dramas: Family by Choice !!!! love love loved it, I’m also biased though because the main male lead is one of my favourites. currently watching When the Phone Rings, obsessed with the storyline. binged Squid Game 2 when it came out, but felt it fell a bit flat compared to season 1, though I know it’s technically incomplete.

• music: my albums of the month were fruitcake by Sabrina Carpenter and Rosé’s rosie. didn’t really listen to much else this month tbh

• books: finally started reading again, picked up some books over my trip too. finished More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, and excited to start the “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” series

shoutouts ⋆⭒˚｡⋆

• jammy jams for inspiring me

• C for inspiring this blogpost

• N for providing a sense of home while I was on my trip

• T for rooting for me

• MM for inspiring me

• MN, JY, FH for tripping europe with me

• my brothers for playing volleyball with me and coaching me

• my friends who attend mosaic (a creative co-working event i run, dm me for details)

• the city of toronto for being a place i can call home

• 2024 for being a year i will cherish for a long time

1. There’s not really a reason for this, I’m just lazy in this regard. Sometimes I also just forget that I packed things away in bags, and sometimes I try to donate clothes only to find my mom wearing them a week later

2. The only item on there I can vividly remember is one that I listed as my dream by age 80, that went something along the lines of “to walk (with canes) with my best friend, wearing matching ‘rawr i luv u’ dinosaur hoodies”. They were all the rage back then.

3. I picked up a Hilroy Studio Scrap Book as inspired by my friend Michael DeMarco, who has been committed to the scrapbook game far longer than I have. This is the main scrapbook I will attempt to use for everyday scrapbooking, or atleast for any bits larger than a standard journal size, as I have a separate leather journal I binded myself. You can read about his process from a decade of scrapbooking here.