It Was Me All Along: A Memoir

by Andie Mitchell

And then I realized that these photographs were quite special. Because they captured the days I didn’t think to document. Those times that went unmentioned, seemingly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Somehow they spoke volumes about my identity. Random images taken throughout the last year. They didn’t have stories and archived memories; they were simply the in-betweens of my life. Each was weird but also revealing. What was most interesting about those photographs wasn’t that they were a sneak peek inside my daily life, but that Daniel found my life worth documenting. Not what I looked like or what I was doing in particular, but my zaniness. The quirks. The simple facts that I tuck my thermal pants into my socks and sit cross-legged in front of my oven door to watch my own baking projects. In not even one photo was I dressed well. What about that time I wore a dress? Each was just something he found special somehow. And now, looking through them all, I realized how lucky I was. He’d moved from Amherst to Cambridge to Philadelphia, and now to one forgettable town in Connecticut, just to be with me. And I loved him for it. Because even when that Connecticut movie crumbled, when the production was abruptly shut down in January and I lost my job because the studio and the director couldn’t come to an agreement on budget, Daniel smiled and offered reassuringly, “The bright side is that now you can start your blog.”