Scrapping the Tough Stuff, Part 1

Early this morning, I was surfing around on scrapbook.com and I came across a post that has stuck with me all through the day today. The poster asked what is a tough subject that you've scrapbooked, and how did you scrap it. There were several people who had scrapped the loss of children, parents, or grandparents. There were some who had scrapbooked either about or for family members dealing with Alzheimers. There were some who had scrapbooked about their own personal challenges that they had dealt with, or were still dealing with. And there were people who had things that they wanted to scrapbook, but they hadn't yet.


Reading all these posts got me to thinking about an album project I had started planning a few years ago. I had seen an article in Simple Scrapbooks magazine about an album a young woman had done chronicling her journey through kidney disease, dialysis and finally kidney transplantation. Boy, did I ever sit up and take notice! As I like to say:"Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it." The article only showed a couple of pages from the album, but if you went onto the magazine's website you could see the rest of the album. So the very next day, that's what I did. There were many similarities between this lady's story and my own; the main one being that our mothers were the donors for each of us. This inspired me to start planning an album to tell my own story. I right away started drafting the journalling. This turned out to be really hard at times. There were times that I as I was fighting tears as I wrote about some of the more painful moments that I went through. (Since I was doing a lout of this at work during my lunch breaks, crying was the last thing I wanted to be caught doing.)

Seeing this post on scrapbook.com has really motivated me to go back and carry on with my album. I'm still in the drafting phase of my journalling; there's a lot of stuff that I haven't written about yet that I want to make sure gets included. And there's a lot of stuff that I've never shared with anyone before now that I want to put in, even though I still find some of it painful. In some ways, I think that starting this album has been quite therapeutic for me. I've been able to write down some of the stuff that I've never been able to express before, such as how I felt like I needed to put on a brave face, even though I was scared to death. I felt as though if my family could see that I was doing okay with all of this, then maybe they wouldn't be so scared. So I kept my feelings to myself. I cried myself to sleep more nights than I care to count, and I wished desperately that I had someone to talk to. But I didn't want to burden my family with what I was feeling because they were already scared and upset at what was happening to me. I guess I was afraid that they would be more upset if I let on just how scared I really was.

To be continued...

TTFN!