On erasing, keeping, and the parts of life that still belong to me 🖋️
Restoring my blog archives, my life story in sentences and snapshots, meant bringing back words I wasn't sure I wanted to face again. But the hardest part has been deciding which ones stay, and which ones I let go.
When I look through my old posts, I see versions of myself I don’t always want to remember. Me at my heaviest, ducking out of photos and hating the ones I couldn’t avoid. Me learning to run, dragging my body across finish lines because I needed to prove I could. Me as a new mother, wide awake at 3 am, writing about postpartum depression when I felt more broken than blessed.
And then there are the marriage posts. The anniversaries I thought would keep stacking. The photos where we looked happy. The vacations where I believed I was building forever. Those are the ones I’ve hovered over most often with the mouse shaking in my hand, ready to hit delete. Sometimes I did. Because it hurt too much to see them, to read words I once wrote with so much certainty.
But not all of them. Not most of them.
Because here’s the truth: even the parts I wish I could erase are still mine. Still part of my story. Still my kids’ stories, too. Someday they’ll scroll back and see who I was when I was raising them: the messy version, the exhausted version, the woman who tried to love as if it would last. And I don’t want to hand them a curated fairy tale. I want them to know the truth: that their mom was complicated, that her life cracked open, that she wrote it all down anyway.
Keeping those posts doesn’t mean I want that life back. It doesn’t mean I’m proud of every word. It just means I’m not pretending it never happened. The record matters. The proof matters. Not because the past defines me, but because it shows the path I walked to get here — the words a map of where we’ve been, even if it isn’t where we are now.
Some chapters close. Some photos are hard to look at. Some words feel like they belong to a stranger. But I’ve left them anyway, because they are proof that I lived them. Proof that I survived them.
The story I didn’t delete is still my story. Maybe not the one I wanted, but the one that made me.
This post is part of my New Chapters series — reflections on rebuilding, resilience, and writing new parts of my story.
