Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The Sum of My Experience

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.
Helen Hayes (1900 - 1993)

I've left cyber footprints on The World Wide Web. Many have been erased. This morning I learned that a lot of my marks were obliterated forever in a massive, late December drive failure over at Journalspace.

Just so you know, this place is not permanent, and can be gone in the blink of an eye.

So I wonder what to do. There is something so convenient about writing online. But I know that if, at the age of 10, I had written my childhood musings on the as-yet-undreamed internet, instead of in a diary or on index cards, those words would most likely not exist anymore. Exactly the same way my hundreds of private and public entries at Journalspace do not exist anymore, except in small, imperfect caches at Google. And even those will go away eventually, and can in no way be tied to me. You know...the me whose name is on a birth certificate and census records.

Even as a child, I was driven to leave a mark. I wanted to be a Famous Author, or at least remembered. So where, now, is the sum of my experience? Only in my head. Not on paper, not chiseled in stone. This THING I'm talking about was my biggest regret when my father died. That a brain that contained so much information was going away. Massive drive failure.

So do I start over here, or on paper? Or both? I'm tired of losing everything lovely.

4 comments:

Marchelle said...

Maybe it's not the same as writing the old fashioned way, like with an actual pen and paper, but I think Keli found a site that will easily print your blog entries. I guess just 'control P' doesn't format them very well, and the site she found makes them more printer friendly?

Then you could put them in binders or make scrapbooks or whatever...Just a thought!

Anonymous said...

oh gosh it's so good to read your words again. i have a terrible anxiety disorder now that journalspace is snuffed out. abandonment issues...i can relate to this post. please don't ever go away again! that was scarey. ;)

MauritaMason said...

M, I really do need to be more diligent about archiving the stuff I write. 90 percent I don't care about, but the 10 percent I value is too precious to lose. That's the stuff that feels as if I didn't even write it myself. The good news is, I got an email from Journalspace this morning with a link to retrieve my stuff, since I was a paid member. Not sure why I can do it, but I'll have a look, at least.

gaily!!! I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see your name. Despite years of trying to work them out, I have abandonment issues, too. :P

theredhead said...

Entries like this are why I worked to find you.