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Resilience
How Scanning Old Family Photos Can Remind You You're Loved
Digitizing old pictures liberates their stories and reminds us who we are.
Posted August 17, 2020 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
For years, Mom’s collection of family photos sat in boxes waiting to be organized “someday.” Of course for a lot of folks, including Mom, that imaginary “someday” would be a very busy day because so much is put off until then.
Because “someday” is not among the words I use in speaking about my own life, I decided about a year ago to hasten the day when all those old snapshots would be organized. I started scanning them, one by one. I cropped them, tweaked their color, and identified people in them as accurately as possible from Mom’s notes on most of their reverse sides.
I started the (still uncompleted) scanning project while Mom was recuperating in a convalescent home after suffering complications from a medical procedure and, to make matters worse, a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection. When I visited her, I would share the latest crop of scanned “old” photos on my iPhone.
As we looked at the pictures, we talked about the people in them—many of whom were no longer with us. We retold old family stories we have told throughout my life. I listened eagerly to stories from Mom’s young life. They helped me to better understand the woman, the mother and grandmother, she had become, the reasons for her choices along the way.
Scanning and sharing the photos liberated memories and stories that had been hidden in boxes for much too long. Something else happened, too, and it was for me the most profound gift of my scanning project. Maybe I hadn’t been ready to see it in my younger years when I first saw these now-old photos, when I took so many more things for granted. But there it was, plain as day. At least it seemed plain as day to the older, wiser me.
In photos of my own November 16, 1958 christening in Mom’s Roman Catholic church, I see a month-old baby being tenderly held by his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles. But what I now see, so clearly and powerfully, is this: I was loved. I was wanted.
The older me understands, and aches thinking about, the sad fact that not every child born in this world is welcomed as joyfully as I was. I feel profoundly grateful to all those people in those photos welcoming me into the world
How often in my life have I felt unloved, even unworthy of love, because I had not fully understood or “owned” the message of those family photos? The little baby in the pictures didn’t have an income. He didn’t own anything. He hadn’t accomplished anything. He had none of the things that so many of us measure a person’s value and “worthiness” of love.
Yet that child was loved—the firstborn, the first grandchild, the first great-grandchild. Generations of people loved the boy simply because he was a part of their family and he would one day help carry their names and their dreams forward into the world and time.
It’s a sad fact of my life that it took me too many years to fully appreciate the message of those old family photos. For too long, I instead took to heart too many of the wrong messages I received about myself—like so many gay men do. Even a loving family can’t always shield us against a world that teaches us we are “less than” equal citizens, or human beings, simply because we look or love differently from the "mainstream."
Fortunately there are tools we can use to fight against those insidious messages that undermine our self-confidence, that falsely tell us we are unlovable and fully equal to our fellow human beings. One tool is to frame our life story as one that celebrates our courage and resilience, that gives us major credit for making it as far as we have already come. Tell your life’s stories—in your own mind and to others—as examples from your own heroic journey of how you have “lived to tell about it.” Think of yourself as a survivor of your struggles, not a victim of life’s cruelty.
Another tool is to revisit old family photos—maybe scan them so they and the stories they tell can be liberated and shared digitally, rather than stuck away in an album or box. Make the happy memories part of your life today. Remember and think about loved ones no longer alive. Draw upon the strength that comes from knowing the people from whom you descend, their stories of surviving difficulties, their resilience.
About a month into my photo scanning project, my beloved mom died. Instantly the moments we spent over what turned out to be her last month looking together at those old photos became one of my most treasured memories of Mom. Looking at family photos, sharing those old stories together with the woman who brought me into this world and nurtured me my entire life, being reminded that I have been loved my entire life, has strengthened my resilience by showing me the solid foundations beneath me.
