Some Words Belong to Their Time

Recently, I found myself reading words I had written more than a decade ago.

Some were poems. Some were thoughts. A few had been shared at the time, while many others had simply remained where they were written.

Reading them again was strange.

Not because I had forgotten writing them.

But because I could recognise the person who had written them, while also knowing that I am not exactly that person anymore.

There were lines I might phrase differently today.

There were sentences I would probably make shorter.

There were words I might replace.

And, if I were writing some of those pieces today, perhaps the entire thought would take a different direction.

For a moment, the temptation was obvious.

Edit them.

Improve them.

Make them sound like something I would write now.

But then I began to wonder what exactly I would be improving.

The writing?

Or the person who wrote it?

Because those words belonged to a particular time.

They belonged to what I understood then, what I was feeling then, and the way I knew how to express it then.

Changing too much would perhaps make the writing better by today's standards.

But it might also make it less true.

That is what eventually mattered more to me.

When I created the Before the Books section of this website, I decided to leave those pieces largely as they were.

Not because I think every line is perfect.

Far from it.

I can see the grammar that could be corrected, the expressions that feel younger, and the places where I would naturally write differently today.

But I can also see something else.

A version of myself trying to put a feeling into words.

And perhaps that deserves to remain untouched.

We often look back at our younger selves with the advantage of everything that happened afterwards.

We know what worked out.

We know what did not.

We know which worries eventually disappeared and which ones stayed.

The person living that moment knew none of those things.

He only knew what he was feeling at the time.

Maybe old writing is a little like an old photograph.

We do not look at a photograph from fifteen years ago and wish the person in it had today's hairstyle, today's clothes or today's face.

The point of the photograph is that it belonged to that day.

Perhaps words deserve the same kindness.

There are hundreds of things I wrote over the years that may never be read by anyone.

Some are in old notebooks.

Some are probably lost.

Some may make very little sense to me now.

But at the moment they were written, they meant something.

Sometimes they said what I could not say aloud.

Sometimes they helped me understand what I was feeling.

And sometimes they were simply words that needed somewhere to go.

That is enough.

I do not think everything we create needs to become something bigger.

Not every thought has to become an article.

Not every poem has to become a book.

Not every page has to find an audience.

Some words may exist only for the person who needed to write them.

And years later, if we happen to find them again, perhaps their purpose is not to show us how well we once wrote.

Perhaps it is simply to remind us of who we once were.

Some words belong to their time.

And sometimes, the most respectful thing we can do is let them stay there.