I made a movie about my life

It’s called my camera roll—and you can too.

I’ve spent a bunch of time in the air recently: to and from festivals and places in Europe where I’m meeting actors or filmmakers for interviews. I’ve realized that my favorite thing to do on a flight is to scroll back through my camera roll so far that I can’t recall the day I’m revisiting. The movie of my life in memes and blurry, front-camera photos and pictures of my friends and hot people in Hollywood.

25th August 2022. It was a Thursday, back when I spent two days of my week freelancing during a clearly quiet time. I swam at the pool I go to and took a thirst trap Speedo selfie in the mirror. I had coffee with my friend Michael Rogers at Bar Italia in Soho. (He’s not on Instagram, so I have no idea what he’s doing day today because I’m bad at staying in touch.) I bought a copy of Rolling Stone with Harry Styles on the cover, and took a photo of the receipt to write it off as a tax expense. Later, I went to Hackney and saw my friend, the film critic Hannah Strong, introduce a screening of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, in honor of the book she had just released. I went home and took a photo of my crown in the elevator, convinced I was balding.

I think buying on-board WiFi is cheating. For once, you are handed the opportunity to ruminate on everything that’s behind you, back on the ground, and find entertainment in a black hole with no connectivity. A plane is not a place for new memories—it’s a limbo space. Our brain pushes our pasts deeper and deeper into its crevices the further we get from them. Up there, you’re handed the opportunity to reconjure them.

I have never been one for diaries, but I do think my camera roll functions as one. Watching it back, particularly on long flights, sort of feels like watching an unabridged documentary about your life. But there’s also a beautiful filter to it. We take pictures of things we want to remember, and keep our phones in our pockets in life’s more sullen moments.

But what our camera rolls offer up is a before and after, which in itself is an interesting way of framing the stuff we don’t want to return to. Most of the brain chemistry-shifting trauma from my life happened before I had a camera phone, but I wonder what it would look like, if I scrolled back to the days of the deaths of my closest family members, before I learned of the news. Was I pouting like a fish in a mirror? Watching a movie? Doing something so profoundly inane that it’s almost as if I was waiting for it to happen?I have no recollection of the garnishing of these moments, only the moments themselves, but I feel like having a visual documentation of what happened around it would remind me of how strange and unpredictable life often is.

As of right now, I have 62,851 photographs and screenshots on my phone, stretching back to 2014. With one hefty swipe, I could scroll back to any day from that point on and live it again. Next time you’re on a flight somewhere, instead of downloading a whole series, or locking in on the in-flight entertainment system, or—god forbid—buying the WiFi, I encourage you to use your phone’s camera roll to its fullest potential. Your life is more interesting than a blockbuster, more absorbing than a book, if you have the patience to process just how much you have lived.

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Rose Gray, popstar extraordinaire, longtime bestie of Dougie Greenwood, dropped a new single last week that has gone platinum in my headphones already. “Club to Your Arms”, a big sexy synthy love song, was co-written with Justin Tranter (of “Sorry” by Justin Bieber fame), who called it one of the top five songs he’s ever worked on. It’s *that* good.

I asked her: What’s the gnarliest injury you’ve ever had?

ROSE GRAY: “I sliced my palm open by cutting an avocado wrong. The knife slipped on the nut and went so deep into my skin I saw muscle. I had to get six stitches.”

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• What were you doing on August 25 2022? Send your paragraph description based on your camera roll below!

• I’ve been in and out of the country so much that I’ve missed a few releases, but I’m hyped for the anniversary restoration of Pink Narcissus, the legendary gay erotic art movie.

• I’m off next week! Going to my second wedding ever–in Italy, no less! Have fun without me. Xx