The perfectionist urge to never revisit my past work (re: myself, two months ago)
This is a big problem for me. I always think my opinions from yesterday are soooo cringe and outdated. Then I read what I actually wrote and I usually am like “actually it was fine.”
I wrote “The revisionist urge to delete everything I ever wrote” while in a somewhat manic state (though I hesitate to use that word without a diagnosis). It is true that I barely got any sleep because I was convinced I had stumbled onto possibly the greatest idea I had ever had. I don’t completely remember writing it. I do remember pressing unpublish on a lot of posts. I have since hit publish on some of them again. But I do want to re-read them, sober, before doing so.
The Great Idea was that “writing is time travel.” We’re constantly in conversation with a text we read, but we never really know when it was actually written. Our writing can travel forward in time well beyond our own lives.
I was convinced that I was in conversation with my past self, my self from the first time I had the idea (last year). I went back to the section I had blocked off on my old diary. I don’t know if I added or changed anything. I honestly don’t remember. But that version of my diary is the one that’s going to travel into the future. I could pretend I discovered, say, Sabrina Carpenter, before I actually did. I wouldn’t do that, since that would just be lying for no other reason than to make myself look cool. But if that’s what I write in my diary, eventually that will become what I believe, because that’s the only record I will have.
A blog is even easier to manipulate than a diary. I wrote this post in 1997, or did I? (It was the same night.) I kind of realized that everyone is lying about who they are online, at least a little, especially to themselves. How easy it is. How little we can actually trust what we read. Even if it’s in our own diary or blog. We still had to choose to write our version of events down. It’s never objective, but filtered through our own ego.
That’s why it’s so hard for me to revisit work, I think: I am not only confronted with an old version of myself, I am in conversation with them through the text. And for trans people, relationships with old versions of ourselves are complicated at best. But I know I should be nicer to them.