“The palest ink is better than the best memory” is an old Chinese proverb.
I recently rediscovered an online blog of mine from nearly 20 years ago. In digital terms this was some very pale ink. It was a hectic time in my life and the more I read the more I realized that my memories of those days were a lot hazier than I had first thought.
Many of us, myself included, pride ourselves upon our memories, yet scientific studies show just how changeable our memories truly are. Even eyewitness testimony, a cornerstone of our judicial system, has been proven to be quite unreliable. We often remember what we think we know or what we think we saw, rather than what actually happened.
This is because humans are raised up on stories. Narrative structures give us a framework around which we can build and organize our memories. We remember how things should go instead of the messy, random sequences that actually make up our lives.
All of which is why, once upon a time, diaries and journals (and now their modern equivalents: blogs, vlogs, podcasts, social media postings, etc.) were so important. Our initial impressions of things might not be any more reliable than our memories, but they are closer to the events that inspired them and serve as an important guide to our thoughts and feelings in the moment.
Be warned, if you start keeping a journal, you may not like it when you go back to days gone by. A popular social media post making the rounds says that “if you are studying history and it always makes you happy or proud, then you aren’t studying history but propaganda.”
Which brings us back to that old blog of mine that I recently uncovered. Far from making me happy or proud, the contents are very cringe-worthy.
I was in my 20s, my mother was undergoing chemotherapy and I had returned home from Florida tail between my legs after a business venture had fallen through. I was working a crummy job, having lots of car trouble and my dreams seemed further away then ever.
Writers are accustomed to looking at their old work with horror and embarrassment. It comes with the territory. It feels a little different reading a log of your daily or weekly activities. It isn’t just your old writing you shake your head at, but also the content.
The best takeaway from discovering that old blog was in seeing how far I had come. Now I’m married to a good woman, have three great kids and am working a job that involves doing something I genuinely love: writing.
Everything that happened then led me to where I am now. If I had not returned to Georgia, I would not have met my wife nor gotten married and become a father. My life would be immeasurably poorer without all those experiences.
So here I am writing about it, laying down some more pale ink, and wondering what I will think, should I last so long, when I look back on this 20 years from now.
