Who Are You?

How has scrapbooking impacted your life? For the digiscrapper there are obvious things, of course. The need for more hard drive space. Overflowing folders of photos. The adrenaline rush when your favorite designer announces a new product release. For the traditional scrapper there's the needs for more paper storage, trying to find new ways to store brads, flowers & ribbon, the little rush we get when we walk through the door of our LSS. These kinds of things are certainly impacting our lives as well as our checking accounts. But when you strip it all down to the basics, due to our choice of hobby, we’ve all added new titles to our laundry list of “who we are”. Titles like storyteller, artist, and historian. Titles that can expand our view of who we are if we let them. As we start winding down the year (I KNOW!!), let’s look at how we’ve been impacted & how we can express that impact.

 When we scrapbook, no matter how we do it, we’re telling a story. We don’t have to write a word if we don’t want to - every picture tells a story, at least to us. But what will this story mean to the people in the photos or the children of the people in the photos? Probably not a whole lot. If you can accept yourself as the storyteller that you are, it may just change the way you look at your “hobby”. It works like this: many times, if we change the way we see things, it actually
changes the way they are. For example - if you think of yourself as an ugly loser, you’ll probably live that out in your life. If you think of yourself as an artist, you’ll be more likely to behave like an artist and do things in an “artistic” manner. If you think of yourself as a storyteller, you’ll allow yourself the freedom to tell your story. It’s a mindset that, combined with practice, will open up that part of yourself. So practice. Give yourself that freedom and be a storyteller.

This one’s a little more obvious, but let’s look at it anyway. Scrapbooking is a very natural artistic outlet. We all have different styles, different ways of expressing ourselves. For some people, that style is more linear & clean. For some, it’s hodgepodge with a more chaotic style - and all the variants in between. We often don’t classify ourselves as “artists” unless we feel we fall into some predetermined artist mold. But that’s just hooey. We’re all artists, we just have different ways of expressing it. And all the things I said in the last paragraph apply here, too. It’s about mindset. It’s about allowing yourself the freedom to actually be what you are. So be an artist. Find new ways to express that - let what you love come out in your layouts.

In this area, we’re also historians. We’re recording our history or the history of those who came before us. What’s so incredibly cool about being a historian is what we can learn from that history. Think of yourself as a doctor with a new patient. The first thing you have to do is get a history. Why? Not just because it’s cool to know personal information about people, but because that history can tell you so much about the patient. It’s kind of the same thing here - by learning & recording our histories, we can reveal so much about who we are that will tell the future generations who they are. What an remarkable opportunity we have! Simply writing down the story can give insight for our children to really know who we are and, by extension, who they are.

So here’s my challenge. This hobby has had an impact on you. For some, it might be more obvious than others, but it has. How can you express that? Think about it like this: scrapbooking has changed your life. It’s helped you become something more than you were. It’s taught you about art & color & design or it’s helped you deal with issues you couldn’t before or it’s simply helped you express yourself differently. All of these things are important. Wouldn’t it be cool to leave a record that explained not only why you scrapbook, but how it’s helped you grow? Things you’ve learned about yourself through this process. It would be amazing for those children & children’s children I mentioned earlier to know that about you. It
also might be surprising for you to see how you’ve grown.