My first hiding place was behind my dad’s legs. I’d bury my fingers into the divots around his knee caps, occasionally peeking out to stare up at the person. If this stranger caught my eye or attempted any sort of an interaction, I’d dart back into hiding like an eel into an ocean cave. I eventually outgrew that hiding place, but my dad presented me with another – a camera.

By technological standards, the camera wasn’t anything special. It was plastic and rectangular, about the same width as my forearm. One button, tiny viewfinder, and a flip door that opened to where the film lived. The camera was of the point-and-shoot species, a term I later learned when I pursued photojournalism. Like with swimming, which I learned how to do after my dad threw me into the ocean, the camera was an open invitation. It was up to me whether or not to accept.

It gave me a license to be an invisible explorer. I documented family pets, my brothers, and family vacations that provided a visual smorgasbord as my dad had a penchant for packing us up to travel to half-built resort towns in Mexico. I still remember the frantic commotion when he fell into an open sewer because he wasn’t watching where he was going.

I took my camera to my Grade 7 graduation from middle school and took photos of classmates with their first boyfriend or girlfriend at the school dance (including one awkwardly framed one where I was more interested in the cute boy walking behind). I took my first self-portrait long before the word “selfie” had been invented because I had just got braces on my teeth which I thought made me look extremely sophisticated. While skiing out of bounds, I took a photograph of a cliff seconds before I fell off it and broke my tailbone. I even documented the first time a couple friends and I got drunk. I want to throw those photographs away every time I come across them.

The photographs are faded now; bonds in the dyes have broken down with the creep of age. Prints, like our memories, are not impervious to time. Even so, they still provide a hazy look through the eyes of a child who wasn’t actually hiding from the world but adventuring into as many corners of it as she possibly could.

Rebecca Blissett is a Canadian writer and photographer. You should buy her forthcoming book Fused.