don’t lose your life to forgetting: why i romanticize everyday
on romanticizing everyday life, noticing more, and taking personal photos
tink-tink-tink-tink went the sound of the rain hitting the metal car roof that i'm cocooning in. ugh, could it be any louder? rain-sound can be annoying when you’re living in the fast lane of your own life.
what’s tugging at me is that i read recently, just scrolling through my feed, someone saying that if they read about “romanticizing” one more time, they were going to vomit or something like that, they were over the concept. this struck me deeply because that’s my whole brand philosophy. and i actually embody that every single day, personally.
it’s funny how something that feels like core philosophy to me can sound like fluff to someone else. i’m not using the romanticizing my life phrase as a trendy buzzword. it’s a literal way of being inside my own life. a way of living i've been cultivating for years, even built my business around.
what do you mean you don’t romanticize your life? i’m protective of this life view. something meaningful to me does not become superficial just because someone has only encountered its shallowest version or cannot personally relate to what they see.
if romanticizing your life means turning everything into performative content, then i’m tired of that too. but if it means paying attention to your own existence enough to remember you are actually here… noticing the rain on the roof of your car and the condensation on your iced coffee cup… then i don’t know what else to call that except mindful living.
this applies across everything for me though: attention makes something sacred. that’s it. that’s romanticizing life. it’s not about “content.” it’s about memory.
stop living slightly behind your own life.
before romanticizing brings me back to myself, self-abandonment looks like treating my life as passing me by instead of somewhere i actually live.
i let life pass me by when i photograph the thing before i feel it first. when i build the project before i know whether i even want to keep it. when i name the whole thing before the idea has had even a second to breathe.
society’s hustle culture teaches us to keep moving because stillness might make us notice we are tired, lonely, overstimulated, grieving, or no longer interested in the identity we’ve been performing.
when i stop romanticizing my life, i become depersonalized, disconnected, and self-detached, and i’m typically living in a faster lane than i realize i want to be in.
romanticizing my life, slowing down, taking small pictures, and writing poetry about everyday moments slow me down. they regulate me. the sensory aspect of writing and recalling tactile memories is hugely important in my life.
but it’s not an easy thing to do, staying present and mindful. especially when doomscrolling social media often.
romanticizing interrupts that by asking us to stay: sit in the car and actively listen to the rain. watch one bird instead of finishing the trail. take the picture because i want to remember the moment, not because i only wanted to make a post about it. romanticizing is actually the moment my life stops being a deliverable and becomes an adventure you get to experience.
romanticizing life is how to keep up with life with agency, rather than living as a passenger. it’s how i stay attuned to my life. and in it. inside it. living it.
someone next to me might see me taking pictures in a cafe and think i’m being performative, but this is my real life. it’s kind of like how reading a book in public can look performative to people who don’t read books. but people who read every day read everywhere!
if my life doesn’t look like someone else’s life and they can’t fathom their life looking like that, maybe their version of romanticizing life looks different. that’s okay. it’s okay to not take a photo. it’s also okay to take a picture if you do have interest in creating a living archive using instagram, facebook, your phone’s photo albums. it’s not shallow. it’s a unique and personalized relationship to that moment that you’ll literally never get back in any other way.
i can scroll back and look at a post and i’m immediately transported back into that memory, that moment, that scene i took a photo of. it’s an archive of memories to recall on command… to me, this is a deeply resonant way of living.
and maybe, yes, i made it look aesthetic, but not in an untrue way. i’m a photographer. i stylize flatlays all the time. it’s just part of my life.
to be honest, it is a hard line for me: it is sometimes difficult to understand when i'm “content-ing” and when i’m romanticizing my life, as far as taking photos in the moment.
but i know that i’m always happy when i take the photo, and i’m always a little upset when i don’t have any photos from a moment at all.
i do have to remind myself that my real life isn’t always based on the perfect shot. often it’s the imperfect pictures that i end up using anyway: a perfectly constructed photograph can look beautiful, but sometimes it fails to tell the story.
sometimes the story is that my desk is messy, because i’m busy. sometimes the story is that my coffee cup is half-empty before i even remember to take a cute flatlay photo, and that’s the story: i must have needed the caffeine in that particular moment.
a personal archive does not have to contain every detail to be truthful… a photograph is always going to be selective. something is inside the frame, meaning something else is just outside it. but what is missing from the image is not always missing from the memory. sometimes one small detail is enough to bring the entire moment rushing back.
curation is not automatically dishonesty. choosing what to include can simply mean choosing which part of the story you want the photograph to carry.
the image does not have to function like evidence for anyone else. it just needs to be a doorway for the person who lived it.
sometimes i take a photograph. sometimes i don’t. the photograph is not what makes the moment meaningful. it’s the attention that does.
the fact of the matter is time speeds up as you age.
sometimes we mistake speed for aliveness. as mentioned by Psychology Today1, “time passes up to 5-10x faster subjectively for an adult compared to a young child. mathematically, a single year is 10% of a 10-year-old’s life, but only 2% of a 50-year-old’s life, making a year feel five times shorter and faster relative to total lived experience.”
basically? the older i get, the faster time seems to move. weeks blur into months. seasons disappear before i feel like i’ve fully gotten to live them. I've found i forget too much because life is passing too fast.
paying attention is how i slow time back down.
photography doesn’t stop time, it reminds me to notice it. i don’t have to take a picture of something to romanticize it. just noticing it for a time and logging it to my memory through attention does the job. but i love going a step further.
the way i live my life now is shaped by a refusal to abandon myself again. i try to stay close to my body, trust what i notice, and remain present enough to actually live my own life to the fullest.
sometimes that means sitting in my car reading while the rain tink-tink-tinks against the metal roof, until the sound becomes deeply safe and regulating… oh my gosh, i almost forgot i love the sound of rain.
being present often begins with something small: a sound, a pause, a moment of attention that brings me back to myself. in parting, i give you the soft reminder: don’t lose your life to forgetting.
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if this essay resonated, you might also like my mini mag on strawberry theory. it isn’t really about strawberries. it’s about the quiet ways we learn to choose softness, attention, and a life that actually feels like our own. 🍓
click here for source (www.psychologytoday.com blog authored by Clifford N. Lazarus, Ph.D., is Clinical Director of The Lazarus Institute)