by Cherry Morris
My name is Cherry and I have a bad memory. Like, notoriously bad.
I get it from my dad. My mum often jokes that if he got dementia, we wouldn’t know because his normal memory is just that terrible.
When my best friend (shout out to Lauren) introduced me to a video journal app four years ago, I jumped at the chance to come out the other side of 2018 with a cohesive summary of my year.
After two years of trying and forgetting (how ‘on brand’ of me) to film every day, 2020 was finally the year I managed to keep up with the project for an entire year with the 1 Second Everyday app. And what a year that was, huh?
Generally, I don’t watch my 1SE mash until the end of the year. No monthly recaps, no mid-year reminiscing. I wait until the 31st of December and watch it back in full for the first time. I’ve found I quite enjoy seeing the things I’d forgotten about pop up at the end of the year while I’m feeling nostalgic, it’s a nice little surprise.
We’re two thirds of the way through 2021, which was a big year for me because it’s the year I moved almost 5,500 miles from my tiny city of Sheffield in the UK to South Korea. This is a move that should have taken place a year ago but it ended up being pushed back twice due to obvious circumstances. However, this year the stars aligned just long enough for me to hop on a plane and jet it across the globe to Incheon airport.
Now I’m settled in, I had the urge to go against my rule of not checking my yearly journal. I wanted to seek out those small pockets of memory that would have otherwise avoided me if they went undocumented. Here’s what I found.
Saying Goodbye
It’s so easy to get caught up in the chaos of leaving that sometimes the goodbyes can get lost somewhere between thoughts of ‘did I remember to pack toothpaste?’ and ‘does deodorant count as a liquid?’
I forced myself and my unreliable memory into capturing every single goodbye I could in the form of a snippet. Seeing those clips on my 1SE timeline can be so much more personal than photos my friends would post on social media or messages in the DMs. They’re mine. These are moments between myself and them that I get to carry with me no matter where in the world I may end up. These are moments that become an integral part of my history because I recognised their importance in my life.
The Big Move
Just like that, August 6th came around and it was time to go. It’s not easy to forget such a big life event, of course. But 1SE has helped me capture the smaller moments that can easily slip through in the chaos that is international travel. Hours in immigration, not catching a wink of sleep on my overnight flight, aching muscles from dragging 40kg of luggage around, losing the negative PCR test result needed to get into South Korea (which actually happened to my friend Ciara). In all this, it’s easy to miss the time I spent buying souvenirs during my six hour layover in Amsterdam (I got a cheese slicer and a wooden tulip that people tried to talk me out of buying because I didn’t need it), frantically filling out forms on the plane I didn’t understand because they were written in Korean, the sky-lit scenes as I drifted into the clouds on my flight out of Amsterdam, standing in Incheon airport taking in the scenery while grappling with the reality that this is it. I just did this.
The image below is what I chose for my 1SE the day I arrived in South Korea, and it may be one of my favourites from the year. I’d stepped off the plane just ten minutes prior to capturing that moment and any time I look at it, it takes me straight back to the very same “I did this” feeling.
Beauty in the Mundane
We all have those days where life is just overwhelmingly average, right? Wake up, go to work, come home, binge-watch some Netflix, then go to bed. We have times where our snippet for the day is a shot of the walk to work or a favourite mug filled with some steaming coffee.
Something I never considered until recently is the fact that my mundane today isn’t going to be my mundane in a month, six months, a year, and so on. New jobs bring new walks to work, new locations bring changes to my routine, new friends bring new moments of joy. But these are things I know I would never consider unless I had them captured in video form. Something I may consider boring in this moment of time may serve as a sentimental reminder of what was once my life.
Even if you don’t have the memory of an 80-year-old like me, it’s no secret that life can get so full-on that small moments can slip through before you even realise they’re there. 1 Second Everyday has come to be an incredible tool to capture those important moments before they dissipate completely, or a place to collect those little ‘boring’ days to look back on when life gets exciting again. Capture those moments while you can, even if you think they’re too tedious. Some day you may look back fondly on that clip of a wooden tulip you wasted €8 on in Amsterdam Schiphol.
Editor’s note: this is part of a series of stories, ideas, and thoughts from 1 Second Everyday’s brand ambassador team, which we call The Un1t. To learn more about the team, go here.
