Ah, how the mighty have fallen. There I was pontificating bout the only record of my life belonging to billionaires in California, and here I am now having had a monumental iPhone fuck up and I’ve lost the record of the last 4 years of my life because i didn’t want to pay £2.99 every month to apple to store my photos on the iCloud. I’ll b fine, I said. I don’t need to back this up.
So here I am with nothing. The only photos on my phone now are scant smatterings of snapshots taken in Paris between 2019 and 2020, five photos from 2017 and the photo that was taken of me in a pub in bethnal green the day after I broke up with my first boyfriend to make my first ever tinder account three wines deep on a thursday.
Who am I if I don’t have a record of things? How will I tell people how cool I was in my twenties, especially now that I can make no more memories in my twenties because they’re over? Things feel so ephemeral in a way. I was thinking about how even when humans are dead and gone I think there’ll be an iphone at the bottom of the sea that covers the whole planet, self charging somehow, with a screen set to never lock, playing the same tiktok video over and over ad infinitum – but it’s so fragile. all that memory has to be stored somewhere, and clouds by nature shift and change.
My mum has got so many photos. My grandparents house was full of them, black binbags went to the dump filled with pictures of places they’d been on holiday, and shots of their shoes, or family snaps with a finger over the lens. I’ve got a picture of the sky from March 2020 and a video of me flashing my arse in covid isolation (we all went mad and made weird content don’t @ me).
I’m scrambling, asking my friends to whatsapp me what scant record they might have of me, and now I have this weird sense of seeing myself and my life from the outside: not my perspective of the last four years, but their view of me intermittently throughout that time.
I had a mad convo on the way into town last weekend. We were talking about reputations – how do we construct them, who constructs yours, does it come from you? How do reputation and identity form a dialogue, to whom, or what, does your reputation speak and does it speak for you or in spite of you?
We came to the conclusion that identity and reputation are in a three-way communication circle. there’s self-identity, that lives in you and is formed by the way you see yourself in the world. The identity that is still you but exists in the world of others while still be actually attached to self-identity, and your reputation. Your reputation that has somehow snipped off the tethers that tie it to you, like peter pan’s shadow, and gone off to run around the world. Telling your ex’s friends all about the you the existed for them. Telling your new job what you were like in your old one. Telling you how you behaved last night at a party you went to, through the lens of a friend of a friend you have yet to meet.
Anyway – the last four years of my life feel like they’ve become untethered from the life I actually lived. In my old phone were the selfies i send as reaction shots in whatsapp. In my old phone were pictures of receipts, train ticket screenshots, pictures of my friends that I loved but didn’t post, or my bedroom when I’d changed it round, of my mum’s old house, of her new one in a state before the reno, of my old car, of outfits i liked and parties i went to. Snaps on sofas, floors, bar counters, streets in paris, new york, london, scotland, st ives, montpellier, toulouse, sete, the isle of wight, dorset, god knows where else. Signs I found funny, drinks i had, dinners i’d made. None of it will mean anything when I’m gone anyway, but I miss it somehow.
In my phone now are my friends pictures of the nights we went on, the things we saw together. My history is viewed through an external lens and it’s a bit uncanny to be honest.
The nice thing about it, the positive framing you’re all here for, is that a blank slate is always an excuse to fill the gaps. To make new memories, to capture new things, to revisit places I’ve already been to remember them better, to try as much as I can to document how cool I am in my thirties, and back up my phone, so that when I’m old and hideous and small people ask me: Lucy what did you do in the 2020s? I might have something to show them, at least.
Cool. I’ve got rid of feelin upset about losing my pics in this post. I hope this serves as a reminder to back up ur photos, and also to take more pictures of your friends when you hang out.
Love you x
Goose FM 