I process deeply personal, often visceral volumes of scrapbooks – and gathering together and processing everything (all you can) from your decades alive (journals, photographs, letters, papers, tickets and any old sort of hard-copy keepsake) is an avenue through which we can sift through the kaleidoscopic sands of time – all the technicolor that trauma brings to our soul.
Scrap-booking is something I recommend because as we immerse ourselves in a past that often only makes sense to a survivor retrospectively,
by documenting our lives through our own creative processes we can reach a level of freedom from those harmful physiological cycles of trauma, and come to a level of peace with all personal circumstances.
Most importantly, scrap-booking is a way to sift through the positive and negative – to rearrange how we view our lives experiences, reassure ourselves, and even to marvel at the passage of time by reliving those experiences – even the painful ones.
Helping not only face our daemons in the eye, but to celebrate and be reminded of those who have touched our lives and enriched it through compassion and love – because no matter how far those times might feel now, the past is never truly done with us survivors, and there are always new lessons to take away from the carnage people leave in the wake of their unspoken cruelties.
