What objects tell the story of your life?

I collect the ticket stubs from events, performances, movies, and even a few plane rides that I’ve been on and while these don’t tell the story of my life per say they do all mark points in time that I’ve enjoyed and want to remember. I’ve been consistently collecting tickets for a few years now but I have a few tickets from way before I started collecting them. 

The tickets themselves hold a certain amount of information such as the  movies I like, what performances I go to, or what the local theaters are. I have quite a few tickets from circus shows because I love watching the circus. I have a lot of ticket stubs from Marvel movies including a few midnight showings, and I have a ticket from an art festival that I went to. The tickets can tell people some information by just looking at what the tickets are for but they hold even more information for me. Who did I go to each movie or performance with? Was it with my family or friends? Both? Did I enjoy it? Was there something special about that event that stands out to me when I look at the tickets? Was the ticket from Urbana or Chicago or from a different state? I have a ticket from California, from the Shakespeare theater in Chicago when I saw six,  another one from the Indianapolis Zoo when I went on a trip in June of 2012 with a friend of mine and her mom. It was the first time I had gone on a sort of long trip without my family. We ate a bunch of gas station snacks in the car and we got to see the dolphin show at the zoo. We were even “Junior Trainers”. I also remember that we were super late coming home.  

To an outside view these objects are all pretty meaningless. I am likely assigning a little too much meaning to tiny pieces of paper but for me they act as sparks in a way. The tickets do not hold all of this information themselves but looking through the tickets allows me to sort through memories I have of these events. I certainly don’t remember everything about these events, some of them I don’t remember at all but the ticket is still there to act as proof that it happened. 

To kind of explain why the “spark” so to speak is so important to me, here is a very recent anecdote. I visited my cousin in Kansas in 2019 and we went to a huge farmers market one day. Flashforward to this summer and my mom mentioned the farmers market for some unknown reason. I was convinced that I hadn’t gone to it for at least a few days until we found pictures of it online that made me remember having gone there. 

It’s instances like forgetting the farmers market that have increased the value I put on the tickets that I keep. If I had a ticket from the Farmers Market I would have been able to just look through my tickets and realize that I had actually been there.

So do these tickets really tell the story of my life? No, not at all, but they act as checkpoints that I can look at and remember times in my life that I may otherwise forget. 

Without the places I’ve gone to and collected these tickets from the objects that would show how I’ve spent the majority of my time would be from school and I don’t want school to be my life.