Editing the Log, Reclaiming a Life

Writing turned out to be closer to recovery than I had expected.

At first it was only a way not to forget.
What exactly that discomfort had been.
Where the conversation had shifted.
Why only that particular exchange left me strangely tired afterward.

If things like that are left untouched, they grow vague over time. And once they become vague, they are easily turned against the one who felt them. Maybe I had been too sensitive. Maybe that degree of discomfort had been normal. Maybe my way of receiving things had simply been a little too extreme.

So I recorded them.

Even a very short phrase was enough.
It only needed to remain in a form that would let me look back later and say: yes, that definitely happened.

At first, that was all.
But as what I had preserved gradually increased, the record began to do something else.

It ceased to be mere storage.
Editing began.

Things that resembled each other started lining up as resembling each other.
Names appeared for discomforts that had once been scattered.
What I had taken to be isolated events revealed themselves as repetitions of the same structure.

When that happens, the past slowly changes shape.

Fragments that had been painful to remember
become materials that can be compared.

Memories that had been simply unpleasant
become a map showing what happened, and where.

I think that transformation helped me a great deal.

What I had carried passively for a long time was moved into an arrangement of my own words. In that instant the weight does not disappear entirely. But its location changes. What had once been swirling in a tangled knot inside the chest begins to take order on the page.

And once something has order, it no longer unsettles you in quite the same way.

Editing also lets in a little humor.

If you pile up only severe events exactly as they were, breathing becomes difficult. So metaphors are born. Names are born. Power-phrases are born. Jokes dressed as manuals appear, and records of observation wearing the face of jokes.

That was not escapism.
If anything, it was the opposite. It was a way of reshaping reality into something that could actually be held.

Some weights can be held only by laughing.
Some structures can be kept in view only after being given a slightly ridiculous name.

In that sense, editing was a form of defense as well.

What mattered most, perhaps, was that recording brought back my own interpretation.

Instead of being organized inside the other person's words,
events were reordered inside mine.

Instead of following the sequence staged by someone else,
I could read the past again in the order that had truly mattered to me.

Once the past is reread that way, certain things come into view.

Here is where I had been worn down.
Here is where I had unconsciously made myself smaller.
Here is where discomfort first received a name.
Here is where I first touched the texture of another world.

Editing, then, is not about making events neat.
It is about returning one's own annotations to one's own life.

That is why strange things begin to happen while writing.

You thought you were tired, yet you become a little more alive.
You thought the memory was bitter, yet it becomes faintly funny.
You thought an event had already ended, and yet it begins to carry another meaning.

That is probably the sign that the record has shifted from preservation to re-editing.

Re-editing does not change the past itself, but it absolutely changes one's relationship with it.

Before, the memory held me captive.
Now, I can place a heading above the memory.

That difference is large.

Whatever can be given a heading is no longer total confusion.
Whatever can be turned into a chapter is already, at least a little, inside one's hands.

I think I was reclaiming my life in exactly that way.

Not by changing destiny in some grand manner,
but by adding new annotations to small logs.

What had been unpleasant?
What had been absurd?
What had been rescue?
What had kept me alive?

As those things were rearranged, the same life began to look different.
Time once spent enduring things passively turned into time of observation and editing.

And once that happens, what remains begins to change too.

What was enjoyable passes.
What was painful also loses its outline with time.
And yet some things remain, things one still wants to look back on later.

They were not entirely pleasant.
And yet they were strangely compelling.
They hurt, and still they stayed.

Those are the things I think I want to call interesting.

What is interesting is not the wound itself.
It is what the wound makes one think about, what it reveals.

And so the record may one day cease to be a warehouse for injuries.
It may become another kind of asset altogether, one that works slowly, a little later.