I don't remember writing that

After writing millions of words, sometimes I come back to something on the page and have no recollection of having put it there.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

We are in the process of moving, and as I’ve mentioned before this undertaking is occupying a lot of space in both brain hemispheres.

The more Type-A part of my functioning is holding together long strings of logistics and deadlines, trying hard to remove uncertainty or surprises from the experience of moving a family and all our worldly possessions from one house to another.

The feeling and creative parts of my functioning are brimming with thoughts and energy. Even if we’re just moving 20 minutes away, and many aspects of our lives will remain the same, the decision to make this sort of change is already sprouting roots that will eventually become a long essay on the what and why.

The intersection of the logistics and the feeling arrived over the weekend.

For most of this process, they have been separate. I would grind away on the details: changing all of our utilities, signing mountains of paperwork, coordinating the moving day plan, and seemingly hundreds of other things my wife and I are tackling. And then in the quiet moments I would think about what it all means.

But over the weekend, it was finally time to tackle the basement in the home we are leaving. Having been here for more than 11 years, arriving with zero kids and leaving with three, it is a little overwhelming to understand just how much stuff we have accumulated. If we didn’t quite know what to do with something, but we weren’t ready to get rid of it, down into the basement it went.

There are boxes that haven’t been touched in more than a decade, too. They might loosely be labeled “keepsakes.” They are the things from my past and my wife’s past that have no utility in our day-to-day lives but which offer a link to our memories and the threads of our former selves.

Opening some of those boxes and trying to decide what I might be ready to let go of and what needed to come with us was quite an exercise in packing and unpacking, both literally and figuratively.

I’m hard-pressed to throw away photos or old videotapes, even if we haven’t had a VCR for more than a decade and I might not look at the pictures again for many years once they inevitably take up residence in a tucked away place in our new house.

Old notebooks with past creative writing have survived multiple moves. It’s comforting just knowing they are still there.

In spending parts of Saturday and Sunday sorting things into piles — things coming with us, things to donate, things to throw away and a few things that still await a final decision — I found multiple copies of the unpublished novel I wrote in my early 20s.

Mind you, I have had one copy in a bedside drawer for more than a year and had yet to open it up to read any of it. My plan is to read it, lightly edit the content, perhaps add some footnotes, condense some of the redundancy that resulted from having far too many characters, and publish it on this site.

I have daydreamed about taking a remote weekend in the woods to finally crack it open and start this process. It feels like something that must happen, but I have been reluctant to even start it.

I’m not sure if I’ve been more terrified that I’ll read it for the first time in 25 years and hate it or that I’ll read it and really like it.

But in the basement, upon finding two different copies in two different places and already being in that fragile space of energized nostalgia, I turned to a random page and started reading.

It was one of many chapters featuring a forgettable character, but it wasn’t bad. I tucked it back into the box and kept sorting, only to find the second copy the next day.

This time, I flipped to the end and read the final three pages. I loosely remembered the structure, and I knew a few of the key sentences.

Mostly, though, I was hit by this several times: I don’t remember writing that.

It’s not a new feeling. Countless times I have looked up some of the millions of words I have written at the Star Tribune and been struck by just how little I remembered of the actual construction of it.

A few times, I simply did not remember it at all. The memory was gone even if the evidence was there, and you could have slapped someone else’s name on it and I would have been never questioned that it was wrong.

When this happens in my professional writing, I can reconcile it. Thousands of blog posts, articles and interviews start to blend together after a while (more precisely a quarter-century or so).

There’s also a disposability to some of what I write, and I’m OK with that. Writing about what happened to the Timberwolves in Game 1 of a playoff series has urgency and is consumed quickly, but by the end of Game 2 it’s largely forgotten.

And there is a deadline element to a lot of what I write that requires words to be chosen efficiently. Do the highest quality work possible in the time you have, then it’s on to the next thing for both the writer and the reader.

In my creative writing, though, those things aren’t true. It has far more room to breathe, it shouldn’t be disposable, there aren’t real deadlines nor the need for efficiency of thought.

The things I’ve written for this site are very much at the front of my brain, and if I go back to read or reference one of them I can recall the process, the place and almost all the words themselves.

Much of that is because of just how recent it is, particularly compared to the novel I wrote. Some of it, too, is that I consider myself to be more present now for my experiences than at various points in the past.

A piece of it — I’m not sure how much — is the nature of writing (or any art) itself. At its best, you get into a sort of zone where the words flow and take over. When you come back to reality, what is left on the page is a manifestation of your conscious and subconscious self.

Just as you don’t always remember your dreams, you don’t remember the making of art. It’s likely I was in that zone more often on the longest thing I’ve ever written than the relatively shorter bursts here.

In comparing my memory of what I wrote 25 years ago to what I wrote a few months ago, though, I am also struck by this: Maybe I don’t remember writing something from the distant past because I didn’t write it.

A person named Michael Rand wrote it, and I remember him going to the same coffee shop near the University of Minnesota and almost daily for more than a year spending hours putting pen to paper writing the entire book in longhand before later typing it.

I remember him conceiving of the idea. I remember his breakthroughs and frustrations.

But I don’t remember a lot of the words he wrote. I don’t exactly remember what it felt like to be him. It’s hard to recall what his worldview was, the freedoms and limitations he experienced, the completely different priorities, joys and struggles of half a lifetime ago that informed his creative process and the choices he made in writing.

It’s hard to remember what it felt like to be at the beginning of a journey instead of the middle of it.

I am him, but I am not him. I am changed in innumerable ways, the same in other ways, but the difference is significant enough and the time distant enough that I can read something he wrote with the fresh set of eyes — not quite as if coming to it the first time, but more like from the vantage point of a time traveler.

Reading those few pages and not recognizing much of it gave me two things: An excitement to read the rest of the book and a clarity in the purpose of the project.

My present self is trying to reconnect with and make sense of my past self.

Making these connections in the process of a major life change perhaps adds to the poignancy of it.

In this journey, you aren’t just moving stuff from place to place. You are moving yourself.

And hopefully the parts of you that survive the trip are the parts you want to keep.