As I begin, I'll admit now that I'm a serial over-documenter. Any event, no matter how commonplace, pictures are absolutely necessary. This is the mindset I lived in all of high school, and nearly all of my college career. Now, as a senior, I'm finally beginning to accept the fact that it's not imperative to take a group photo every time you go to Buffalo Wild Wings with your friends.

The first time I realized this was actually a problem for me is when a friend invited me on a hiking trip but specifically told me my invite was contingent upon the fact that I did not bring my camera. Granted, this was a pretty rude way to tell me not to bring the camera, but that's when I realized that my picture-taking mania was annoying the people around me. This was an extremely hard pill for me to swallow. Like many other basic college girls, I am a self-proclaimed photographer and videographer. For roughly eight years now, my passion has been in creating photos and videos. For me, part of what makes events and trips so fun is getting to put together all the photos and videos after its done. It's like an extension of what just happened, getting to experience the fun even longer.

My main drive in always having photo evidence of an event, or always making a trip recap video, is to make sure I always keep good memories alive. I love being able to look back on the amazing things I've done in my life. What I had to learn the hard way was that sometimes, the pursuit of documenting these memories was causing the memories to feel false, or even negative, for other people.

What really drove this home was going to a concert in April of this year. I've never been one to take videos of entire concerts and put them all on my Snapchat story. If you do this, I'm gonna tell you right now: Stop it. It's obnoxious. Back on point here: that night at the concert, I watched a lot of the audience watch the concert through their camera lens, not through their own eyes. Granted, they have the entire concert on video. They can go back whenever they want and watch that concert again. But because they were spending their entire experience watching the show through their phone screen, they missed the real emotional beats of the show.

Applying this to real life, and not just to concerts: If you're living your whole life through a camera lens, are you really living it at all? Are you really experiencing your life if your constant focus is to get that one perfect picture or one video that captures what you're feeling? Odds are, if this is your focus, all you're capturing is a moment that you weren't fully present in.

There's nothing wrong with me taking pictures with my friends. There's nothing wrong with me creating fun videos after I've done something cool. But I have to stop living within the camera. Our lives are not captured in pictures, our lives are captured in beautiful and genuine moments spent with the people we love.