A beautiful scrapbook page does not have to be about a beautiful moment. It doesn’t have to be about a happy, chill, or everyday moment either. You can make beautiful, visually appealing scrapbook pages about the things that happen in your life that aren’t beautiful. I know it seems like I am repeating myself a lot, but that is because I really want to impress that fact on you. Many times scrapbooking, and memory keeping as a whole, suffers from social media syndrome - where we only document the parts of life that we feel are appropriate to share - happy, big, everyday moments that don’t always show a full depth of what our lives actually encapsulate. We document the pregnancy, but not the miscarriage or the complications. We document the first day of school, but not the hours of battling through homework, evaluations, or IEP meetings. We document the trips to Disney or the park or the zoo, but not the overtired overstimulated meltdowns that often come from those outings. We document the cookie-making, but not the mess. We document learning to drive and getting a license, but not failing the driver's test or wrecking the car. We document the coffee dates and outings with our friends, but not the moments of overwhelming boredom and loneliness. We document the baby being born, but not the death of a child. We document the marriage, but not the divorce or death of a spouse. We document falling in love, but not falling out of it.

Honestly, I get it. Some of these things aren’t things that we necessarily want to remember, and sometimes we just genuinely don’t want to document these things. Many times I feel like we probably just don’t know HOW to document these things, and the inspiration, when you find it, can often seem daunting if your style doesn’t lean towards artsy or messy. Often pages with darker, more emotional, unhappier themes tend to be messy, artsy, or chaotic, and hey, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a messy art journaling style page, however, if that isn’t your vibe you might think that those themes aren’t really ones that you can also document.

I love to scrapbook all of the different moments from our life, but most especially I love documenting the not-so-great ones. It gives me a level of processing the situation or memory while also reframing the way I see it as something beautiful as well. Here are a few tips on how you can document those things in your own pages while not having to fully change your style to do so.

No photo? No problem.

A lot of times when life is knocking us down we aren’t pulling out our phones or cameras to capture it in a photo. Photoless pages may seem challenging if you are used to basing your scrapbook page around pictures, but a good trick for that is to just use a journaling card or piece of paper in the spot you would put a photo. You can either then use that area to write out about the memory, or you can just place a title there. You could even just use a card with something already on it as a design or title already made.

What about when you just don’t have the words?

So maybe you do have a photo or a photo that isn’t necessarily of what happened but of who it happened to, but the problem is you just don’t have the words for it? I have found that sometimes sharing my thoughts, while helpful to me, isn’t going to be necessarily what I will want to look back on or what others will want to see. I will often use a photo that I know is going to remind me of something that happened and pair it with a theme or title that will help enforce that.

In this page, while it might look like just a sweet photo of my son and me snuggling, I know that this is about the miscarriage that I had. The photo was of me emotionally exhausted after having my miscarriage confirmed and falling asleep after snuggling my then-youngest to sleep. So in this situation, I know the story but isn’t one that I am just fully sharing on the page, and using a photo that I can’t ever just see as a sweet photo in a way that lets it have its moment of sweet beauty as well.

What if you have the words, but don’t want just anyone to see them?

Now, as a digital scrapbooker this actually isn’t a technique that I can implement, but paper and hybrid scrapbookers can, which is the simple just hide your journaling trick. You can easily tuck your journaling about what is going on somewhere in your page where it is behind, under, or inside something else.

In this page using the Renewal collection, I have the tag wrapped around my photo like a frame, but if it was a paper page, I could have easily kept the tag in the same spot, but made it to where it pulls out and put my journaling there. So while this page fits the last tip with no journaling but knowing the situation of the photo, it could quite simply be used in this tip as well.

What if you just don’t know how to document something?

This is a bit of a harder one. When Traci released her Felicity collection I struggled hard with deciding what to do with it as a team member. It was this beautiful kit in colors that I loved focusing on happiness and joy, and at the time I was just two months out from the death of my son. No part of me at the time was in a place of making a page about joy, but I still wanted to find a way to use the collection to document where I currently was. So how to go about that? The simplest thing that I can tell you is to just create a page that is beautiful to you. It doesn’t have to reflect what is going on in the picture or story. I went with a recent photo of myself that matched the colors of the collection and then just made a page I found visually pleasing. Then I just simply added journaling reflecting where I was mentally.

What would I even use to document this?

Really you can use any sort of scrapbooking collection to document the bad and not-so-great moments. I have used happy collections to holiday-themed ones. However, you can find on theme collections for these pages. For example, Traci has her FREE Tempest collection that is for those times when things aren’t great. I used in this page that I made about missing my son.

However you do it, just do it! It might seem like something that you think you would never want to document, but I promise, you will generally find the process to be therapeutic.