链接：http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/13/i-lost-a-decade-of-photographs
字数：1400字
I lost a decade of photographs
（1）I remember my grandmother used to keep all her family photographs in a box by the front door so that if there was a house fire she could save them. The cat could fend for itself but, in the days before digital cameras and hard drives, if you lost a photograph, it was gone for ever.
（2）As a member of Generation Y, I thought that I was immune to this worry, until two months ago when I accidentally deleted every digital photograph I had ever taken. This included all photographic evidence of my university days, my backpacking adventures and every family gathering during my 20s. It also included every photograph I’d taken of my husband, Eoghan, who died from cancer three weeks after our wedding.
（3）I have no one else to blame but myself. In September 2013, my relationship broke down and my ex-partner and I agreed that he would get “custody” of our shared laptop. As all my files were stored on the computer, I arranged for him to transfer more than 2,600 photographs on to an external hard drive.
（4）In retrospect, when I collected the hard drive, I should have checked to make sure all of my photographs were on there but instead I saw a folder marked “Amy’s pics” and made an incorrect assumption.
（5）I only realised my error 12 months later, when I wanted to show my new boyfriend evidence that I’d been a goth at university. I plugged in the hard drive, clicked on the folder … and it was empty.
（6）I’m not the type to panic prematurely in a crisis. When you watch your husband die at the age of 23, most everyday mishaps seem manageable in comparison. But my stomach tied in knots as I sent a text to my ex-partner asking if he happened to still have my photos stored on the computer. I knew in my heart that his answer would be no before his reply arrived, and I couldn’t blame him.
（7）I spent the next two hours in a state of denial, checking and rechecking every folder on my computer, Dropbox and iCloud with no luck. My grandmother’s worst fear had happened to me and every photo in my archive was the equivalent of ash.
（8）The only pictures I have left are those taken before my 21st birthday, mostly out of focus and taken with a series of cheap disposable cameras. Apart from that, every snapshot taken between the ages of 21 and 29 is now a distant memory.
（9）The first thing I did was share my grief on Facebook, changing my status to, “That feeling when you delete every photograph you’ve ever taken #badday”. My update hit a nerve with every friend from my age group and I was inundated with platitudes. As a generation we’ve been groomed to believe that no event is valid unless there is evidence it took place.
（10）A number of friends suggested that I put a shout-out on social media asking anyone with photographs of me to email them, but this wouldn’t help me. It wasn’t the loss of public events such as birthday parties and baby showers that hurt so greatly. It was the intimate, private moments that I was really mourning – the moments that seemed so magical and so unbelievable that I didn’t trust my memory of them.
（11）A whole church congregation had photos of me saying my vows at the altar but that wasn’t the extraordinary point of my wedding day in my eyes. Only I had been there to capture the moment my husband awoke the next morning and, despite being riddled with cancer, turned to me and whispered, “I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
（12）Likewise, I know my parents have photos of the floral tributes at Eoghan’s funeral but only I was there the moment he fell into a coma, when I’d pressed my cheek against his and taken a selfie because I wanted to remember that he still had a smile on his face even at the end.
（13）That was seven years ago and, though I rarely ever looked at those photographs, I always knew they were there as a reminder. Yet, to my surprise, I didn’t cry when I realised I would no longer have these memory prompts at my disposal. In fact, as the weeks went on, I felt an odd sense of relief and lightness.
（14）When a song on the radio reminded me of Eoghan, I was no longer tempted to spend an indulgent afternoon poring over old photos. When I was having a fat day, I couldn’t look back at photos of my 21-year-old self in a bikini and wish I still had the constitution of a child.
（15）I began to wonder if my mistake could actually be a good thing. In our culture of constant self-curation, it’s tempting to look back on photographs taken on our best day, showing only our best sides and find our life lacking. Could our need to capture every milestone stop us from living in the moment and ever feeling content?
（16）“A permanent record of our lives can imprison us in unrealistic and hurtful feelings about ourselves, our bodies and our relationships,” warns Marie-Pierre Cleret, a psychologist who specialises in narcissistic behavioural disorders. “Such photos, which are often carefully framed, styled and filtered, can make us see our past through a skewed lens.”
（17）When it comes to grief, many self-help books recommend making a memory box filled with reminders of your lost love, but there is an argument that such a shrine could be detrimental for some people.
（18）“One of the most powerful processes of grief or disappointment is the fact that our memories fade with time but digital evidence can keep us frozen in a period,” says Cleret. “That series of pictures taken on a wonderful holiday can become weapons in the hands of our inner critic. We can glorify who we were, who others were and the glamorous life we led.”
（19）In her book Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst argues that we need to accept that there are losses in life that we need to undergo and embrace in order to be fulfilled, whether it’s a first love who wasn’t suitable, the body a mother had before giving birth or the party life we enjoyed before responsibilities. I can relate to this after my experience.
（20）I have always been very conscious of not placing my late-husband on a pedestal, but sometimes my subconscious still idolises him. I even painted a rose-tinted view of our relationship in this article without meaning to, when I wrote about our wedding day. I didn’t mention the huge argument we had because I caught him smoking a cigarette at the reception. If the professional photographer noticed us feuding in the corner he certainly didn’t capture the conflict, but maybe it should be acknowledged.
（21）It may not be a picture-perfect moment, but it’s all part of the cartoon strip that made up our love story.
（22）It has been two months since I realised my photos were missing and I’ve not only accepted my loss but I can see there are benefits to no longer having a shrine to my 20s. That’s not to say that I’m anti-camera, as I’ve already amassed more than 600 new photographs, but I’ve also downloaded an app called X-pire that erases all social media photos after a set expiry date, so at least my avatar is a current representation of me.
（23）I do worry that, when I’m older and – hopefully – have children, I’ll wish I could show them pictures of me when I was younger, but maybe it’s better that I can’t step into a time machine. In the days before digital cameras, photographs naturally aged, faded and wrinkled in parallel with the person who took them. That’s the natural order of things.
字数：1400字
I lost a decade of photographs
（1）I remember my grandmother used to keep all her family photographs in a box by the front door so that if there was a house fire she could save them. The cat could fend for itself but, in the days before digital cameras and hard drives, if you lost a photograph, it was gone for ever.
（2）As a member of Generation Y, I thought that I was immune to this worry, until two months ago when I accidentally deleted every digital photograph I had ever taken. This included all photographic evidence of my university days, my backpacking adventures and every family gathering during my 20s. It also included every photograph I’d taken of my husband, Eoghan, who died from cancer three weeks after our wedding.
（3）I have no one else to blame but myself. In September 2013, my relationship broke down and my ex-partner and I agreed that he would get “custody” of our shared laptop. As all my files were stored on the computer, I arranged for him to transfer more than 2,600 photographs on to an external hard drive.
（4）In retrospect, when I collected the hard drive, I should have checked to make sure all of my photographs were on there but instead I saw a folder marked “Amy’s pics” and made an incorrect assumption.
（5）I only realised my error 12 months later, when I wanted to show my new boyfriend evidence that I’d been a goth at university. I plugged in the hard drive, clicked on the folder … and it was empty.
（6）I’m not the type to panic prematurely in a crisis. When you watch your husband die at the age of 23, most everyday mishaps seem manageable in comparison. But my stomach tied in knots as I sent a text to my ex-partner asking if he happened to still have my photos stored on the computer. I knew in my heart that his answer would be no before his reply arrived, and I couldn’t blame him.
（7）I spent the next two hours in a state of denial, checking and rechecking every folder on my computer, Dropbox and iCloud with no luck. My grandmother’s worst fear had happened to me and every photo in my archive was the equivalent of ash.
（8）The only pictures I have left are those taken before my 21st birthday, mostly out of focus and taken with a series of cheap disposable cameras. Apart from that, every snapshot taken between the ages of 21 and 29 is now a distant memory.
（9）The first thing I did was share my grief on Facebook, changing my status to, “That feeling when you delete every photograph you’ve ever taken #badday”. My update hit a nerve with every friend from my age group and I was inundated with platitudes. As a generation we’ve been groomed to believe that no event is valid unless there is evidence it took place.
（10）A number of friends suggested that I put a shout-out on social media asking anyone with photographs of me to email them, but this wouldn’t help me. It wasn’t the loss of public events such as birthday parties and baby showers that hurt so greatly. It was the intimate, private moments that I was really mourning – the moments that seemed so magical and so unbelievable that I didn’t trust my memory of them.
（11）A whole church congregation had photos of me saying my vows at the altar but that wasn’t the extraordinary point of my wedding day in my eyes. Only I had been there to capture the moment my husband awoke the next morning and, despite being riddled with cancer, turned to me and whispered, “I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
（12）Likewise, I know my parents have photos of the floral tributes at Eoghan’s funeral but only I was there the moment he fell into a coma, when I’d pressed my cheek against his and taken a selfie because I wanted to remember that he still had a smile on his face even at the end.
（13）That was seven years ago and, though I rarely ever looked at those photographs, I always knew they were there as a reminder. Yet, to my surprise, I didn’t cry when I realised I would no longer have these memory prompts at my disposal. In fact, as the weeks went on, I felt an odd sense of relief and lightness.
（14）When a song on the radio reminded me of Eoghan, I was no longer tempted to spend an indulgent afternoon poring over old photos. When I was having a fat day, I couldn’t look back at photos of my 21-year-old self in a bikini and wish I still had the constitution of a child.
（15）I began to wonder if my mistake could actually be a good thing. In our culture of constant self-curation, it’s tempting to look back on photographs taken on our best day, showing only our best sides and find our life lacking. Could our need to capture every milestone stop us from living in the moment and ever feeling content?
（16）“A permanent record of our lives can imprison us in unrealistic and hurtful feelings about ourselves, our bodies and our relationships,” warns Marie-Pierre Cleret, a psychologist who specialises in narcissistic behavioural disorders. “Such photos, which are often carefully framed, styled and filtered, can make us see our past through a skewed lens.”
（17）When it comes to grief, many self-help books recommend making a memory box filled with reminders of your lost love, but there is an argument that such a shrine could be detrimental for some people.
（18）“One of the most powerful processes of grief or disappointment is the fact that our memories fade with time but digital evidence can keep us frozen in a period,” says Cleret. “That series of pictures taken on a wonderful holiday can become weapons in the hands of our inner critic. We can glorify who we were, who others were and the glamorous life we led.”
（19）In her book Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst argues that we need to accept that there are losses in life that we need to undergo and embrace in order to be fulfilled, whether it’s a first love who wasn’t suitable, the body a mother had before giving birth or the party life we enjoyed before responsibilities. I can relate to this after my experience.
（20）I have always been very conscious of not placing my late-husband on a pedestal, but sometimes my subconscious still idolises him. I even painted a rose-tinted view of our relationship in this article without meaning to, when I wrote about our wedding day. I didn’t mention the huge argument we had because I caught him smoking a cigarette at the reception. If the professional photographer noticed us feuding in the corner he certainly didn’t capture the conflict, but maybe it should be acknowledged.
（21）It may not be a picture-perfect moment, but it’s all part of the cartoon strip that made up our love story.
（22）It has been two months since I realised my photos were missing and I’ve not only accepted my loss but I can see there are benefits to no longer having a shrine to my 20s. That’s not to say that I’m anti-camera, as I’ve already amassed more than 600 new photographs, but I’ve also downloaded an app called X-pire that erases all social media photos after a set expiry date, so at least my avatar is a current representation of me.
（23）I do worry that, when I’m older and – hopefully – have children, I’ll wish I could show them pictures of me when I was younger, but maybe it’s better that I can’t step into a time machine. In the days before digital cameras, photographs naturally aged, faded and wrinkled in parallel with the person who took them. That’s the natural order of things.
