One Good Thing

life, backwards

Having all this spare time on my hands is a funny thing.

You see, I’m not comfortable with time. I take time. I bide time. I waste time. I kill time. But I don’t use it, not in any real sense of the word.

Now I’m sitting in a room that’s not my own, sleeping in a bed that’s not my own, suspended in a sort of non-reality, losing track of time altogether.

I don’t know what to do with myself.

I have become a stranger to myself — a shock in the mirror, an impostor wearing my pyjamas and my underwear and occasionally my lipstick.

I chat with the nurses about trivia, I reassure the pathology collector that I’m OK with the sight of blood, I say, ‘I don’t know,’ when somebody asks me how I’m going, and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all. I don’t recognise it.

I’m stuck here by myself, having to look at myself, listen to myself, and simply be by myself.

And it’s uncomfortable.

Once the crossword puzzles are complete and the novels are finished and I realise, yet again, that it’s impossible for me to nap, I’ve exhausted my list of Things To Do.

So, I’ve found myself looking into different folders on my laptop.

My whole life is stored, to a great extent, on my laptop right here. All of my personal writing, all of my pictures, all of my academic work, all of my professional work, all of my e-mail, all of the files and papers and quotes and miscellanea that I’ve collected and hoarded on this single hard drive for more than five years. I am umbilically attached to my laptop. If I can’t write, I can’t breathe.

Yesterday I trashed hundreds of photos.

I skimmed through endless pictures of cats and cakes, pausing to stare at some of the more unusual images that caught my eye: the photo of my arm when I almost broke it falling off a chair in my bedroom while trying to hang curtains; smiling from behind windswept hair with the city of Kassel smeared in the background; kissing an ex-boyfriend while my old black dog wandered unknowingly through the frame; kohl-rimmed eyes gazing deep into the lens on a night when I had no idea that my life was about to change irrevocably; head tilted upwards into some weak Sydney sunshine after I cut off all of my hair that time.

Then I read back through my blog archives. Some entries made me laugh. Some entries made me frown. Some entries surprised me. How quick I am to forget some things! How slow I am to process others…

Taken as one long, undulating stream of consciousness, my writing seems to reveal parts of myself that I can only see through the clarifying lens of time. I am at once familiar and strange. And I’m reminded once more how uncomfortable I am with myself.

I found my eyes drawn inevitably to errors and flaws. Whether it was a blurred photograph, an awkward sentence, the lopsided dimple in one cheek, or a misplaced comma or letter, the more I looked and the more I read, the more discouraged I began to feel.

Why can’t I look back at myself or back on my work or back on my life itself with any convincing sense of pride or accomplishment?

Am I too close to myself or too far away?

I suppose that, if I didn’t have an eagle-eye for error, I wouldn’t be any good at my job.

But what I’m coming to realise is that maybe I’m not the best editor for my own life.

As a writer and an editor, I know all too well that the best person to edit my writing is, in fact, somebody else. Our brains are tricky. We often read what we meant to write, not what’s actually there on the page or screen. That’s how typos slip through the net even after multiple read-throughs. (That’s also how the human eye can read words upside down or make sense of jumbled text as long as the first and last letters of the word remain the same. Brains fill in gaps.) Unless you can put a piece of your own writing away for a significant length of time – to allow it to become unfamiliar once more — you cannot typically edit that piece of writing with any helpful sense of objectivity.

Your eyes are too close to the page.

Sometimes, however, too much distance can also be a problem. The editor who forgets that the author is another vulnerable human being is a shitty editor. The editor with too much detachment can edit ruthlessly, soullessly. They become a tyrant with a red pen in hand. Sometimes I am that tyrant. Homing in on every imperfection, questioning insignificant matters of style, shifting, adding, and deleting for the sake of it. For the sake of being ‘right’ or ‘better’.

Where’s the comfortable middle distance? I want to know.

For too long, I have allowed myself and others to either pick me apart or leave me alone entirely. I wait for a label from somebody else — ‘smart’, ‘exasperating’, ‘punitive’, ‘hopeless’, ‘full of potential’ — and I wrap myself in it, unable to assess for myself who is right or what is right or who is real and what is real. Or if there’s a real or a right at all. My identity is tethered to labels but there’s nothing living or breathing inside of them.

I’m living my life backwards. I’m receding into the past, stuck in the mistakes for which I cannot seem to forgive myself.

I need an editor to help me out. Somebody close but objective. Somebody who recognises my humanity and can massage my flaws into the whole of myself again, the sum of my parts — neither unequivocally good or bad. Somebody who can hold up an honest mirror to myself and invite me to look in and look away for long enough each time to make sense of it all.

Because none of it makes sense.

Backwards or forwards.

None of it makes any sense.

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