Rare is the social gathering when I don’t later rewrite my lines. I recently spent a twenty-minute walk figuring out how I could have better organized my points in a work meeting. I came away from time with friends plagued by different phrases I could have used to capture my feelings. After a recent fight with David, I wished I could eat half my words.
This type of thinking feels as natural to me as breathing, I suppose because editing is such a part of my days. I write, and then I edit. I read what someone else has written, and then I edit. So I talk and edit too.
In creative work, deletion often begets beauty. Michelangelo famously viewed the sculpture of David as addition through subtraction. He chipped away the excess marble to find the statue already living there. My last drafts hardly resemble my first drafts, mostly because of how much I’ve trimmed.
I subconsciously believe life is similar—that if I ruminate hard enough, I’ll get a redo to say what I meant more beautifully. But my attempts to rewrite the past are like editing an email already sent or a book already published. Hardly time well spent.
Underneath my desire for life’s delete key is resistance. I’m putting my hand out to try to stop the flow of the big ol’ river of life, and it’s making my arm sore. It reminds me of how lightning strikes only hurt so much because our bodies resist their current. We convert the electrical energy into heat and physical trauma instead of allowing the jolt to flow through.
On the brink of surgery to remove my gallbladder, I’ve come face to face with the pain of resistance. General anesthesia scares me. Trusting a surgeon scares me. The all-on-my-ownness I’ve felt going into and coming out of past surgeries has crept up and grabbed me by the neck, and I found myself yelling at the top of my lungs today and taking breaths that were too shallow.
In my yell were a thousand wishes for things to be different. For my gallbladder never to have acted up; for past surgeries to have gone differently; to have been given a trusting soul instead of a doubting one.
My throat is hot and scratchy from all I’ve been trying to wish away.
But then a whisper of a thought. The vulnerability you are feeling is everyone, everywhere, all the time. We just don’t usually notice it.
You can keep on searching for a delete key you’ll never find
or lower your hand,
bow your head,
and try on trust like a jacket
that may take a few washes to fit.
" The vulnerability you are feeling is everyone, everywhere, all the time. We just don’t usually notice it." So true.
As the young people say, “relatable content.” I have a handful of images and interactions from years in the classroom that I wish I could edit (meaning “completely delete”). But the most meaningful revision for me has been forgiveness and compassion offered to my past self.