The Redactor!

Being in the legal field all these years, redaction is second nature.  This idea that we pour over documents and remove from view things that we do not want the other side to see.  Sometimes it is because of privilege, sometimes it is a privacy thing, often it is a guise hidden by an alleged good reason...

The Epstein Files have put redaction front and center on the American stage.  Files released that are now almost unintelligible to anyone reading them.  As the public at large has found out, it is a next level skill to read between and around the redactions.  What is there and what is missing?  And why?

This is not a dive into the Epstein Files...I just cannot push myself to go there.   I am so disgusted at the whole debacle.  So very disgusted at what passes for judgment and accountability in this country.  To me it is just more of the same: white men of privilege protecting other white men of privilege to the detriment of women, girls and children.  What the fuck else is new?  A story old as time...and I am so fucking sick of it.

Ok, so I could not contain the rant...

But what I wanted to discuss today is this idea of the redaction we do in our own lives.  The censoring out information, the idea that other people are on a “need to know” basis.  We tend to be redactors in our lives, removing from view all the things that we would like to shield others from, sometimes just in the beginning and other times, forever.

I was a HUGE redactor in my life.  Removing story lines and things that happened to clean it all up and prettify it.  Make it more seamless and smoother than it actually was.  I, in fact, started this blog because I wanted more accountability for my tendency to redact.  I wanted to be authentic.  To be the same person in all areas and aspects of my life.  It has been a process.  I am not saying that I share EVERYTHING here, but I share a lot. And the stuff I don’t share here, which isn’t much, as you can read, I share with others that are in my inner circle of trust and intimacy.  

To a large degree, I have addressed my tendency to redact the things that I do not want you to see or know and just allowed the chips to fall where they may.

Where I have been quite blind though is with YOUR tendency to redact.  I did it for so long, and now I really don’t, so I tend to miss completely that some of you are masters at redaction.  It has taken some pretty painful lessons for me to see that just because I gave up my identity as REDACTOR does not mean that you did, will or want to.

So for quite some time, I have failed to ask myself intelligent questions about you and your backstory.  Believing, quite naively, that you also want to be known for who you really are, warts and all...

Believe me when I say, this was a steep learning curve for me, even though, upon further reflection, your tendency to curate whole fictions, outright lies and convoluted stories that were designed to trick me into believing something that was so far from truth that it bordered on delusion, yours and mine.

I have put the cap on my black marker (yes I know that it likely the redacting function in Adobe that is doing the redacting and not a pen) and done my best to show you who I am. To tell you the backstory. The hard parts.  The ugly parts.  The unflattering and awful parts.  I am not trying to portray a version of myself other than who I actually am.  What you think of me, isn’t really my concern.  And is a stream of thought that has not served me well...

Instead, it is important that I just put it out there.  No redactions.  Just the whole story and me and you can decide whatever you like about it which also includes not reading it at all.  I think this is going to be especially important for me as my book comes out in the fall where I shall reveal the hardest truth of my life. One that I have kept on the down low forever.  It isn’t that I don’t talk about it, I just don’t write about it.  Avoiding, forever, giving that part of myself immortality by committing it to the page.  Well, my last redaction shall be aired this fall. Stay tuned...I mean, if you want.

I wonder how much we would change as a people if we stopped trying to clean it all up and just showed ourselves and our life histories to be what they are.  If we didn’t try to pretty it up and make it seem like we are better or worse or whatever.  If we could just have the courage to be ourselves and own all that which is ours to own.  No redactions.  No false narrative.  No whitewashing the truth, just living as authentically as we can and allowing the truth of ourselves to speak for itself.

Redaction is manipulation, plain and simple.  And I was a redactor for a long time! L O N G T I M E!  But I committed, with this blog, to begin the process of putting down my black marker and allowing you to see all the things, as much as I could stand. And I think, I have gotten pretty good at telling the truth.  To owning that which is mine.  To showing up as myself to the best of my ability. To telling you the truth about my past and what got me to the place we are now.  I do not need to censor the past.  It remains large and looming regardless of what I let you know, and the more I tried to hide from it and you, the worse I got and the sicker I became.

We are as sick as our secrets.  And while I do not advocate just unleashing your past and unfurling it onto the masses, I do believe that letting go of the idea that there are things that we did or said or happened to us that makes us unloveable, unwantable, unworthy, is work well done and needed.  We keep the stuff back that we fear will cause us to be maligned and mistaken and judged.  But in so doing, we give away our power. And we allow the past to write our present.  We stumble and fall often because we are blind to all the roadblocks and debris that litters our present with bombs set but unexploded from our past.  We live in a minefield we created, all because we were too afraid to face our truths.  And we believed we could redact ourselves into some better version that you might like better.  All while we engaged in conduct that made us hate ourselves more and more with each passing day.

We all redact.  I have come to accept this.  Even as I profess not to, I am sure I still do it.  I censor, shield, wall out things that are too painful, too hard, too vulnerable from those that I want to manage their image of me.  I say that I don’t do it, and I do think I do it less, but I am sure that still do it.  That black marker back in my hands going to town on a past that is hard and littered with things that I really wish did not happen...

But what I can say emphatically is that when I find myself, black marker in hand, I do my best to set it down and correct the record.  I try to own that which is mine and dismantle the fictions I created with all the shit I left out, hid or obscured.  I can’t say I will never redact again, because of course, I am the great redactor...but I can say that when I find myself engaging in this time tested and protective action, I do my best to put the pen down, print out a fresh page and show you who and how I really am.  It is the only way I know how to live free.  Free from worry, concern, free from a past that I do not like, but I know directs so very much of my life, even still.

We are all redactors.  But, with a little bravery and intention, we can begin to tell a more honest narrative...I mean, the time is drawing near and the truth really needs a come back story.  And we all get to decide, to perpetuate the lies or stand for the truth, ugly as it may be.  And having lived in both worlds, the great fiction and the horrible truth, I can say, without a fucking doubt, the truth, no matter how terrible it feels, is or we fear is better than the redacted version of us that is so very loosely based on who we actually are.  And we cannot hold people accountable for not liking the person we are pretending to be, which is likely, at least in part, why we redact in the first place...

So perhaps we put the black marker down and just allow truth to find its way into our lives.  And we give up the secrets and lies and live more authentically in our skin, our lives and truths.

Again, still...