Deletions
What is the point of an archive?
For a while last year, I was really into reading personal blogs, and there were so many people who had been blogging for twenty years. Some of them had kept their blog archives and painstakingly migrated them between platforms more than once. I felt envious. It felt like that saying, "The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best time is today."
I remember when I read blogs in the early 2000s and it did feel for a while like everyone who wrote a good, popular blog was getting a book deal out of it and then ghosting their blog. Why hadn't I gotten in on that?
It seemed, logically, like the second best time to start a blog was immediately. And of course, I did have an archive, of sorts. Years of writing on various topics. Some of it published, some of it unpublished. Poems I wrote when I was studying poetry. Articles I wrote when I was trying to build my Linkedin presence (ugh). A few of the essays I wrote on Substack. Shorter pieces from when I briefly had a micro.blog and a Pika blog. Little write-ups on books I'd read.
So, I pulled all of those together in Obsidian and then uploaded them to Ghost. I loved having a site that had all of my work in one place. I was so proud of it -- briefly.
Today, I exported a csv file of all the posts, and looked through them. There were only a few that I loved. Most of them, I felt fondly about, but I didn't feel like the whole internet needed to have access to them forever. Many of the most important themes in these pieces had re-emerged in later work that was now much more interesting to me.
I password-protected the Ghost site while I thought about it, but I think I'm ready to embrace curation. I don't need a whole archive following me around forever. There are maybe, maybe, three pieces I actually want you to read. I don't need to prove how many I've written before that. Maybe I'll think of this older work as construction lines in drawing. They served a purpose and now they're ready to be erased.
Related
https://brennan.day/writers-who-burned-all-their-words-feat-bix-frankonis/
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-deleted-my-second-brain
The act of deletion is a reassertion of agency.
https://breakthroughsandblocks.substack.com/p/this-might-work-what-happens-when
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/creativity_business