Last year I watched a video made by professional runner, Kyle Merber. Aptly named, "The 24th Year." It was a compilation of two second videos, one shot every day, while Merber was 24. It's one of those videos where after watching you instantly declare: I want to do that.

So I did.

I started taking videos the day after my 19th birthday. What struck me most about Merber's video was the way it truly reflected what he did on a daily basis. The videos weren't self-centered, or obviously pre-meditated. From my viewing, they seemed to be honest captures of his daily life and I wanted my video to reflect the same. So, I rarely planned when or where I took a video, which had its ups and downs.

The pros: I was living in the moment still. I wasn't concerned about getting a certain shot, or something cool. Actually, a lot of my videos are really uncool. Cue all the solo shots of me sleeping or watching TV.

The cons: I missed some important things. I missed my sisters unwrapping gifts Christmas morning. I missed me and my boyfriend dressed up as Jersey Shore characters for Halloween. I missed my track team winning indoor conferences. I missed the ball drop at midnight. But again, this goes back to the fact that these videos were overwhelmingly spur of the moment. I wasn't so wrapped up in presenting my life in a certain way in order to look interesting and fun. There also are a lot of people who aren't in this video, or at least not enough, that are huge players in my life. Then there are some people who are in it a lot. I wish I had the forethought to include everyone equally, but I'm glad I kept it raw and spontaneous. Also, I didn't want the whole video to be scripted, and a lot of these were taken without people realizing it. I tended not to shoot a ton of people who didn't know about my project.

Another con -- not planning out meant I missed a couple days. And that's probably the thing I'm most disappointed about in this video. I don't love to tell everyone that but I also don't want to lie. Some days it would slip my mind and I'd make up for it with an additional video the next day. I always felt guilty about that and wondered if Kyle did the same. I feel like I may need to re-do it another year just for authenticity's sake.

Putting the video together was probably the most fun of this whole process. I knew it was going to be a big undertaking and I considered starting the compiling before the year was up, but I held out. I didn't put the majority of videos together until the last week of December (my birthday is mid-January) because I was going away to Italy and knew coming back I would not have enough time before my birthday to get it all done.

So I threw about 200 or so videos together, cut them all to exactly two seconds long, and went on a plane bound for Florence (that's another story!). I came back the day before my birthday and approximately 165 more videos to add, edit and set to music.

Here's what I came up with:

The moral of this journey: it was awesome. I highly suggest you do it. Looking back on the videos is an incredible moving scrapbook of not just your own life, but how it coincides with a whole host of other lives, intentionally or not. If you do it right it's an honest account of the highs, lows and in-betweens we all face in a year. And it will amaze you to see how time flies -- two seconds at a time.