{"id":14401,"date":"2024-04-17T16:53:48","date_gmt":"2024-04-17T16:53:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14401"},"modified":"2025-07-25T02:00:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T02:00:12","slug":"grieving-lost-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/04\/17\/grieving-lost-media\/","title":{"rendered":"grieving lost media"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Temple of Juno in Agrigento, oil on canvas, Caspar David Friedrich (1828-1830)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I want to really get this right, to really feel the resonant heart of it that lets me let go of notes that no longer serve me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It might surprise some of my Twitter followers to hear this, but I think of myself as a rather sad person. I\u2019m always kinda sad somewhere. I\u2019m always grieving. I\u2019m always carrying the memories of the broken hearts and souls of my predecessors, and of innocents who have suffered. I\u2019m always dealing with a form of survivor\u2019s guilt. I\u2019m sad that the world can be so cruel. Recently I rediscovered that I’m also always sad about a lot of my childhood, which is something that I obscure and minimize, in part precisely because of the nature of that childhood. And lately I’ve come face to face with some of the ways in which I had been inadvertently cruel and neglectful myself. It’s all very sad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruins \/ mess<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve had a handful of data loss pains in my life. Diary X. A journal I kept while I was in the army. And my own WordPress blog. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There comes a point where I have to ask myself what all the mad archiving is for. i\u2019m so afraid of losing something. i guess i\u2019m a bit of a hoarder. first thought is that I don\u2019t want to admit it. second thought is, well i\u2019m a content professional. if all my stuff was in an office rather than in my home, it wouldn\u2019t seem very messy at all.\u00a0 (I’m going to be moving to a new home very soon, so I’m very eager to see if I can design things differently for myself.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is a mess, exactly? I remember thinking the thought \u201cmy house is a mess\u201d, and then thinking \u201cthat\u2019s such a vague statement\u201d. How many objects are there? I know there\u2019s a ribbonfarm post about messes but I don\u2019t really want to look at it right now, I want to think my own thoughts first and maybe revisit it afterwards. My notes are a mess<\/a> and I\u2019d like to sort them out more than I\u2019d like to Get Thinky about messes. But upon revisiting this, I wonder if it’s necessary to Get Thinky at least a little bit in order to make progress on the more complicated, sprawling messes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve always had a fondness for ruins, paintings of ruins, poems about ruins. There\u2019s a lovely quote from Ellen Ullman that goes, “We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” It speaks to me deeply even though I\u2019m not a software developer. I just can\u2019t help but see how it applies to all complex systems. We build languages the same way. And philosophy. And anything substantial, like a writer\u2019s body of work. I\u2019m reminded now of how my friend Arden put it: we are all systems, and we are all programmers<\/a>. (So what? How does that follow?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a previous essay I used the metaphors of matryoshka dolls and trapdoors<\/a> to talk about \u201copenings\u201d that lead to interesting possibilities, and how I wanted to be more deliberate about seeking that out in future essays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life is full of mysteries.<\/strong> There\u2019s a \u2018meta-mystery\u2019 about how we don\u2019t see it, we don\u2019t typically go about our days feeling mystified. This seems to be largely a quirk of human psychology. Our minds are really good at making things seem<\/em> like they make sense to us, even if upon closer examination, they don\u2019t. We often deal with this by simply not looking too closely at anything. Which tends to work pretty well, until \u2018extraordinary\u20191<\/a> circumstances force us out of our comfort zones, pull the rug from under us, and suddenly we\u2019re faced with something startling, unexpected, overwhelming. (One of my favorite anecdotes about this is by Mark Miodownik, author of the book Stuff Matters, who was inspired to become a material scientist after being stabbed with a razor blade shiv<\/a> by a robber on a train platform in London.2<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any given moment, your<\/em> life is likely full of mysteries, too, even if it seems perfectly ordinary to you. The point here is that everybody\u2019s life feels ordinary to them.<\/em> I can always be called upon at any moment to gush about how incredible existence is. Everything from the age of the universe to the nature of galaxies and solar systems, to the improbability of Earth\u2019s existence, and life on Earth, and people, and consciousness, and language, and writing, and technology\u2026 it\u2019s all incredible stuff. It\u2019s incredible that I\u2019m writing words on a laptop right now, and publishing them \u2018to the internet\u2019. It\u2019s incredible that you\u2019re reading these words, and that you will in some sense understand them. If you take a step back and really see what\u2019s going on, everything is absolutely amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we don\u2019t typically see it. That\u2019s my point. We have obligations and responsibilities and bills to pay and tasks that are overdue. We have old griefs and heartaches that we haven\u2019t finished feeling, and new anxieties about all manner of things. There\u2019s an inconceivable volume of stuff going on competing for our attention\u2013 and that competition has produced Olympic-tier attention-grabbers\u2013 and it would be hard to resist even on a good day, let alone when we\u2019re tired, busy, distracted, overwhelmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trapdoors. Possibilities. Mysteries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to spend my hour(s) of writing today reflecting on a mystery in my own life, and particularly in my own body of work, my notes which I often describe as a junkyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[[[ blog history:<\/strong> my main blog, currently www.visakanv.com\/blog\/, has been on quite a journey. a long time ago it began as visakan.diary-x.com. when diary-x got destroyed, i started over at livejournal. eventually i started visaisahero.wordpress.com, which took me a while to find my footing, and then i migrated that to visakanv.com\/blog\/. the blog itself has been through many seasons, many iterations, changing templates. initially i wrote personal updates for my friends. later that became facebook status updates. i went through a phase where i sought to emulate some of the mid-00s bloggers like tim ferriss, leo babuta, seth godin and so on. at some point i was writing almost exclusively about singaporean news and politics.]]]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DX<\/strong> From the ages of 10-16 or so, I used a somewhat obscure blogging platform called Diary-X, abbreviated dx for short. It had great vibes, a lively community, and the whole thing was run by one guy Stephen Deken, on a server with a single hard drive with no backup. When that hard drive crashed, all dx users lost all their blogs irretrievably. It took me quite some time to switch to livejournal and wordpress and tumblr, but none of them ever quite felt the same. but isn\u2019t that always how it is? nothing is ever the same. nothing can ever truly, fully replace anything. there\u2019s always some idiosyncrasy, some surprising little detail that you might not have even noticed in the first thing, until you notice it\u2019s absence in the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

90wks <\/strong>When I was in the military, ages 19-21, I got really excited about the idea of \u2018turning my life around\u2019, really \u2018getting my shit together\u2019, cultivating good habits, becoming more functional, generally becoming more skilled at everything I cared about, including the skills of caring and the skill of becoming more skilled. When I had 90 weeks left in my 2 year mandatory stint, I started \u201cthe 90 week experiment\u201d, where I would meticulously track everything in a paper notebook that I carried everywhere with me. About 60-70 weeks into the experiment\u2026 I lost the notebook. I was absolutely devastated. I didn\u2019t have a smartphone yet, so I hadn\u2019t thought to take pictures. I did have a scanner at my parent\u2019s place and I scanned a page or two here and there3<\/a>, but I hadn\u2019t even considered the possibility that I might lose the whole thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s one more thing I feel like I ought to mention alongside dx and the 90weeks notebook, which is that\u2026 so after those two things, eventually I found some sort of decent cadence of writing on my wordpress blog\u2013 which was initially visaisahero.wordpress.com, which i later redirected to visakanv.com\/blog. I wrote all sorts of things on it, and it started to feel clunky and overwhelming. So I did what I thought was a clever thing to do, and\u2026 wrote a 4-part summary of all of the posts on my blog, and then deleted most of them. The summary was worth writing, but deleting the posts\u2026 I have come to regret.4<\/a> I find it so funny-sad in hindsight that it\u2019s not even like I had some dramatic reason for the deletions, it\u2019s not like I had something to hide or I was running for office or something. I just felt it was really messy, and I suppose I might\u2019ve been inspired by some Minimalist(TM) content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These 3 experiences are representative of what I think is a deep-rooted grief I\u2019ve been carrying with me my entire adult life, as an author and archivist. When Diary-X was destroyed, at the time I mostly felt shock at the loss of something I had gotten so used to having around, like losing a friend\u2013 but as the years go by and I get older, I increasingly feel sad about having lost years of records of my earliest writing. I\u2019m forced to try and piece together meaning from mere fragments. (A random detail: I was really<\/em> into Radiohead in my early teen years. Much more than I remember. It feels \u2018memoryholed\u2019, in that it doesn\u2019t seem to be a casual forgetting.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s sad. And painful. And I don\u2019t think about it a lot day-to-day. But it\u2019s such a big deal. They are some of my \u2018canon events\u2019.5<\/a> And I think\u2026 if I am to make \u2018progress\u2019 at the thing i\u2019m trying to talk about here, i have to revisit these events, fully, clearly, openly, honestly. this is the trapdoor i need to step through right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure you seek.\u201d \u2013 Joseph Campbell<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Am I afraid to step through this particular trapdoor? I\u2019m inclined to say no, and yet I must admit that I \u2018got distracted\u2019 from this blogpost several times, such that I\u2019m probably not going to publish it in a single sitting because I\u2019m now starting to get really tired and sleepy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What else do I have to say? i\u2019m tired i\u2019m gonna sleep on it. but i guess i want to remember to be sorta grateful? if not for these pains, would I have ever become the mad twitter librarian that i became?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

questions for me are things like, what are my notes really for? what is the actual desired outcome? what are the messes of my intentions? can i get to clarity of intention, honor all the different parts of me, and find a more elegant configuration that serves all my selves better? how would i act differently once that is the case? the essence of GTD is to have a system you can trust so that you can stop having to worry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there\u2019s something i wanna say somewhere about overcorrections and this feels like the place to say it<\/p>\n\n\n\n

i used to feel like i spent too much time just bumming around unproductively with friends and i overcorrected that by not spending time with friends at all<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n