Scrapping About Difficult Topics...

I never got the chance to take photos of my layout for Ali's class last week until yesterday so here we go...

The 3rd week of Ali's BPS class was great. Very challenging but great! You know when you put something off because you think it's very hard... too hard... and then you do it and then you feel so great afterwards? Well Ali encouraged us that it's important to get difficult things into our scrapbooks too. It quite often helps us to write about them and afterwards it feels great having documented them. At first I panicked about this subject. I didn't know what to write about. But as soon as I saw Ali's own layout (featuring a health problem which I won't mention here just in case) I knew what I was going to document...

Something that I have been wanting and meaning to get down on paper for the last year. Something that I just didn't know how to start dealing with, what to document, what to not. I was scared of writing things down and seeing them in black and white, yet at the same time I wanted to have it all documented in one place...

My severe eye condition that I was diagnosed with back in October of last year.

Apologies for all the blacked out lines on this layout. It contains far too much personal information to put out on the internet LOL! I had a lot of information, dates and photos I wanted to make sure were featured. Ali's layout only contained text on one side and one large photo (instead of 6 that I used in the place). So I doubled my text over 2 pages and printed 12 smaller photos. Photos showing how bad I saw at different times, my official appointment papers, prescriptions, coming back with a plastic shield taped over my eye after both laser surgeries etc. The text describes the last year with as much information as I could fit, including dates. On each side (where you see the black lines on the bottom left and right) I used a date stamp to stamp out all my hospital appointments with the specialist, plus after some of them I made little notes, by hand, referring to the specific visit.

This was hard. This was something I wanted to do. This was something I was dreading to do. But I'm SOOOO glad I did this layout. I felt great afterwards, having all the info in one place, and I'm really, really grateful to Ali for making me take that step to do it. Unfortunately it looks like my eye problems have not ended here so who knows, maybe I have to do a follow up layout some time later.

If you have something similarly hard to document, but something you really want to get down on paper, I really encourage you to sit down and get it done today. It will make you feel so good afterwards. :)