WP3: Note to Selves

Michael Farmer
Writing 150 Spring 2021
13 min readApr 24, 2021

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You don’t see the seasons resisting change

You won’t catch the night fighting back against the day

Clawing and scratching to stick around and stay

But we seem to have a lot more trouble

Dealing with our built-in impermanence

Than any other thing

Living or not

In existence.

As a child, I found it strange that adults didn’t seem to talk about their childhoods very often or in much detail. When I would press them for information, my interrogations would usually be stunted by a barrage of “I don’t really remembers” and “that was a long time agos”. At about 7 or 8 years old, I began to realize that most people forget the vast majority of their childhood. At the time, I took this revelation to mean that everything that constituted my world, all my friends, passions, troubles, thoughts, and experiences, would quickly be forgotten and vanish from my mind as if they had never existed. You could say I was a fairly morose 3rd grader.

Fearing that my future self would forget present me, I took action. I began to keep a running archive of my life and the events that took place within it. Although my habit of self documentation didn’t arise in such a sudden, conscious manner, it nonetheless developed consistently over the years. I would keep books I didn’t like, shirts that no longer fit me, and other items with no tangible utility. I felt the need to preserve things solely for posterity’s sake.

Looking back, I’m not even sure if I was aware of the connection between my inability to reconcile the inherent transience of life and my growing habit of holding onto objects, thoughts, and memories. Keeping track of and recording my life just became a way of approaching the present moment. One example of this habit came about when we were renovating our bathroom when I was about 8 or 9: I kept one of the patterned floor tiles that were being stripped and thrown out. I just didn’t want to forget what the floor looked like. And in a way, it worked. I remember the blue shade and geometric pattern of the floor because of that chunk of tile, and I’d be willing to bet that nobody else in my family, maybe nobody else in the world, can exactly recall what that specific floor looked like a decade ago. Although that piece of life trivia may be meaningless in isolation, the preservation of it represents a glimpse into parts of the past that would be long gone by now if it weren’t for that broken tile I decided to remember.

There are many things like that blue floor tile that seem useless in and of themselves. And when viewed in a vacuum, they probably are. But when I weave them into the broader collection of the pieces of my life that I’ve archived, they take on much more significance. By incorporating these seemingly random bits and pieces of fragmented ideas, lists, writings, and more into the broader narrative of my life, I’ve been able to turn the “raw material” of my lived experiences into “something truly ideological.” (Rosas, 2). I find a lot of comfort in knowing that it’s my agency that gives these things real meaning, that I can take the puzzle pieces that compose my life and fit them together in a coherent fashion.

I’m frequently asked why I unwaveringly scribble things down that might very well never see the light of day again after they’ve been written. Why I save things I don’t need. Why I remember things that could’ve easily been forgotten. I have no answers for these questions, only a couple working theories that I can share. I believe that within my Life Archive exists enough raw information about me and my life that a person could come closer to understanding me in my totality than they would if I just told them about myself. Although I’ve come to realize that these collections of musings and passing thoughts can’t ever be perfectly synonymous with me as a complex, conscious living person, they are undeniably an important part of who I am and who I’ve been. I find it extremely interesting to read through some older entries from time to time, just to get a glance into the mind of who I used to be (or at least part of him). I know that it’s a limited (and probably biased) keyhole through which I look back at the past, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless.

Life is one of the most confusing things that any of us ever attempt (along with filing taxes, rubix cubes, and thinking about what Stonehenge was for). I think it’s a natural instinct to grasp for control over our lives, to try to create pockets of order in our lives in a largely chaotic world. By keeping a record of the things that happen to me in life, and further, transcribing my thoughts and feelings about them, I’m able to more efficiently create meaning from the inherently random things that happen in my life. By controlling what I record, I’m able to “exercise agency” over these things as “an act of identity formation” (Cardell, 501). Simply by choosing what experience or thought is worth remembering and valuing and in what context, I incrementally add layers and plot points to my life narrative (while still adhering to my reality as objectively as possible, not intentionally misleading or omitting).

I’ve lived much of my life thus far in a way that is oriented towards preserving the past for the future. However, I understand that these things I write down or collect are no more likely to stand the test of time than any of the other works of human creativity that have already been forgotten. I understand that trying to reverse the flow of time is physically impossible. I understand that trying to grasp onto things that are already gone is about as practical as trying to build a house on top of quicksand, but I do it nonetheless. In this writing I’m going to explore how this exercise in futility arose, how it manifests itself, and what the implications of it have been on my conception of my intellectual identity.

While my peculiar desire to hold on to fleeting things may be a bit extreme, I find it slightly reassuring to know that this impulse has been alive and well in many, if not most, human beings for as long as we can collectively remember. From autobiographies to cave paintings to diaries, selfies and home videos, these are just some of the manifestations of the human impulse to leave some sort of physical record of their existence, to preserve a thought, moment, idea, or feeling in whatever form they can. It seems we want to prove (I’m not sure to who, though) that we were here, that we existed, and that we, too, once lived. I’ve come to see this deeply and specifically human impulse as a battle against impermanence, an ultimately unwinnable fight against the passage of time.

I’ve always found it interesting that we place so much emphasis on the importance of recording, archiving, and studying history and our collective experiences as a species, yet relatively little on the importance of our individual histories. Personally, I’m more fascinated by the minute details of a story rather than the big picture of it. For example, Anne Frank’s diary is the most influential and well known document about the impact of WW2, one of the most widely documented events in human history. Her need to write about her world may have arisen from that same impulse to battle against impermanence that we all feel, to create something that’ll prove we existed once we’re gone. In simply recording the passing thoughts, daily events, and minutiae of a teenage girl’s life, Frank left for the future a window of striking clarity into (a part) of the world as it once was. However, life archives, including mine, aren’t always created for future generations, but sometimes for our future selves.

While I have been practicing a “preservation mindset” for a large portion of my life, my process for documenting the details of my reality didn’t truly take shape until I got an Ipod in 7th grade. Though I did have sporadic journals, collections of odds and ends, and a heap of miscellaneous papers and documents, there was absolutely no underlying organization to my Life Archive. That changed when I found the notes app on the Ipod. I realized I had a portable, pocket-sized notepad with me wherever I went, and I immediately took advantage of this new technology.

I found that writing about and recording my world into this little LCD notebook was a great escape from that world itself. Rather than passively consuming bright, flashing images on instagram or half-consciously watching people’s snap stories, I was typing things down. I figured that if I was going to have my face glued to my phone, I might as well do something marginally more productive than the virtual voyeurism that is social media. After a while though, I began realizing that this process could be a genuine component of my self-care and maintenance. I started devoting more thought to what, how, and why I was documenting. Gradually, what began as both a consequence of fearing impermanence and needing something to keep my hands and mind busy turned into an activity that was producing genuine emotion, substance, and art.

The notes app became the primary home for everything digital that I felt like I wanted or needed to remember. Simply due to this development in technology and my access to it, the process for recording my life was fundamentally altered. The proliferation of internet access around the world has vastly increased the amount and extent to which a person like myself can record the data of their life, be it through digital calendars, photos, notes, voice memos, or whatever other data-preserving application. Life writing scholar Kylie Cardell argues that the “digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography and life writing than perhaps any other branch of literature” (Cardell, 501). It’s been interesting to grow up in a time where, because of this “digital revolution”, I can nurture this impulse to preserve more than any other point in history.

Preserving the content of my life on my phone is often the most convenient for storing and retrieving things quickly, but I still appreciate the very intimate art of physically journaling and writing. Writing about our own lives can be an “act of therapy” and can allow people to focus more on “the changes in their life and to find new stories” (Swanson & Vaughn, 211). When we have a physical collection of writing that documents our own lives, it provides us with an anchoring object from which we can view the course and patterns of our days from a removed perspective. Rather than just letting my brain select one or two standout moments to define an entire period of time, I’m able to take a more holistic look by referencing old journal entries, photos, notes, and other preserved elements. The increased retrospective objectivity that this practice breeds allows me more easily identify patterns of behavior (positive or negative) and adjust accordingly.

Although parts of my “Life Archive” exist in the physical world beyond the notes app, the hundreds of distinct notes on my phone are the most accurate representation of the archive as a whole. Each note, whether deeply personal, childish, or totally incoherent, preserves a different aspect of my experiences, thoughts, and ideas. There are disorderly streams of consciousness, lists of my favorite poems, running entries of my dreams, half-developed ideas for movies, and many, many others. If you’d like to see a more in depth analysis of how some of these notes came to be, how they operate, and what function they serve, check out my WP2.

One of the functions of my Life Archive that I value most is its ability to function as both a form of self-formation and self-education. By writing down my thoughts on certain subjects, documenting what I did and where I was on a given day, and actively trying to make sense of the world around me by selecting to preserve elements of it that I find value in, I’m able to actively construct my interests, belief systems, and personal values. In doing this, I also manage to teach myself lessons about human life that resonate with me more deeply than when those lessons are conveyed to me by some external force. This is just one form that self-education can exist as, but in all forms it is an essential step in naming the world rather than letting figures of authority name it for you (Jacobson, 25). The fact that these preserved entities are made by and for only myself allows me unfettered creative, intellectual, and personal freedom to explore the world around me and my place in it, unbothered by external pressures.

My impulse to archive my lived experiences has also deeply informed my development as a visual artist. From an early age, I enjoyed taking photographs and videos. Looking back, I realize that I was less interested in the aesthetic quality of the images I was capturing than in the act of perfectly preserving a moment in time and space. As the English writer John Tagg once wrote “the photograph asserts the overwhelming truth that ‘the thing has been there’: this was a reality which once existed, though it is a reality one can no longer touch” (Tagg, 1). While a photo’s context, meaning, and legacy are subject to interpretation, the content of it is objective and is indisputable evidence of the moment it depicts. I think the preservative power that film and photography both possess is what initially drew me towards those mediums and is part of what keeps me fascinated by them.

When inside other people’s homes, I always pause for a moment when I come across a door frame with heights, dates, and names written on it. I often think of my Life Archive as a decentralized, digital version of those time-stamped door frames. One of the most unique perks of having access to this running Life Archive that now spans nearly half my lifetime is that it can function as a defacto timelapse of my brain. By rereading past writings in chronological order, I’m able to roughly trace the path of my brain’s development. To be completely honest though, most of my earlier writings make me cringe. Many of the thoughts expressed are childish, naive, hypocritical, whiny, and shallow. Sometimes I’m tempted to erase some of these sheerly out of embarrassment, but I always repress this impulse of vanity. I’ve come to take pride in the god awful writing of my former selves, not because they’re inherently valuable, but because they underscore how much I’ve progressed as a writer, as a person, and as a self archivist. I value some of my oldest (and usually worst) writing because it functions as a convenient measuring device for how much I’ve grown and changed over time.

The preservation of my life through writing, photography, collecting, and other methods of recording my experiences has been a consistent process throughout my life, and I’m likely to continue it for the foreseeable future. However, I want to discuss the limitations and pitfalls of this practice so as to not totally romanticize it or uncritically endorse it for others. Yeah, yeah, I know I just wrote a whole essay regarding how much I value holding onto even the most minute and trivial things in life, but there are admittedly limits and dangers to not being able to let go of the past.

One such danger is to fall down the documentation rabbit hole that prominent polymath Buckminster Fuller did. Starting sometime in his 20’s, Fuller began meticulously documenting every single event in his life, creating a journal entry every 15 MINUTES for nearly 5 decades. In his own words, “I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record.” (Fuller, Oregon Lecture #9, p.324, 12 July 1962). The danger of this mindset is that with the increased ease and ubiquity of documentation that I discussed earlier, we can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of memories we preserve. Fuller’s desire to document LITERALLY EVERYTHING in order to achieve objectivity of the past is fundamentally flawed. Unequivocal objectivity is another unwinnable battle that humans love to fight. While I can understand the kind of impulses that would drive a person to create such an extensive recording of life, I think the time and mental space that the process entails outweighs whatever perceived benefits.

We shouldn’t hope to bring everything with us into the future, but only that which still serves us. Today, I try to make a point of only documenting things that I can imagine will have value to my future selves. As famed organizer Marie Kondo would ask of anything we consider holding onto “will the future me need this to spark joy?” (Cardell, 500). This is admittedly really hard for me to do, and sometimes I still preserve legitimately useless pieces of information and data.

When travelling, I’ve learned to leave a solid 10% of the space in my bags empty. Having a bit of space to pick up something new along the way I don’t ever want to feel like I’m so inundated with relics of my past that I can’t possibly take on anything new or novel in my life. I want to leave room for me and my life to grow and as much as it pains me to say, there are things in life that are best left forgotten, or rather, unremembered. The brain is a future-oriented organ, and only holds onto the parts of the past that might make it’s future easier. Humans may be the only organism that disregards this tenet, as we often hold onto things that serve no purpose but to drag us down and keep us from moving forward. It is difficult to maintain the balancing act of holding on and letting go, but it’s important nonetheless.

So much of human activity, whether consciously or not, is predicated around fighting the inherent ephemerality of life. We build massive monuments of steel and concrete, concoct religions that are supposedly unassailable by the passage of time, and create art that we hope will outlive us. And while all of these attempts at permanence all eventually fail, that doesn’t mean we should stop trying if the process is able to imbue our days with meaning.

My Life Archive might never be read by another person or have any commercial purpose, but the lessons and introspections that I’ve been able to gain from the process of creating it are invaluable. It gives me a clear depiction of where and who I’ve been, allows me to view my past from a more removed and objective perspective, and also simply caters to my nostalgia and sentimentality for the people, places, and things that I can only reach through the memory of them.

Works Cited

Cardell, K. (2017). Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 32(3), 499–517. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2017.1337993

Farmer, M. (2021). Proof of Life A digital footprint of the people who I used to be. Medium. https://medium.com/proof-of-life

Frank, A., Mooyaart, B. M., & Roosevelt, E. (1993). Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Reissue ed.). Bantam.

Helmeke, K. B., & Sori, F. C. (2006). Therapist’s Notebook for Integrating Spirituality in Counseling, Vol. 1: Homework, Handouts, and Activities for Use in Psychotherapy (Haworth Practical Practice in Mental Health) (1st ed.). Routledge.

Jacobson, J. (2018). What We Talk about When We Talk about Autobiography: Henry Adams and Education Narratives. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33(1), 25–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2018.1389827

Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Michael Farmer
Writing 150 Spring 2021

I'm a part time cellist, an acclaimed hang glider, the life of every baby shower, banned from 3 continents, and am trying to perfect the art of folding pants