How to erase yourself

By Freja Newman

Only through memory was I able to rediscover the parts of myself I was taught to lose. As I sift through old footage, photos, and misspelt dreams, I embody a bereaved witness to my past self’s estate. I had expected to grow. I didn’t expect to disappear. 

At some point in my life, I learnt to be less. It wasn’t just one day or moment, but rather a culmination; a series of lessons and learnings. Over time, I felt the weight of people’s eyes and thoughts, whether or not they were directed at me in the slightest. For years, I would wince thinking back to my past self, my younger, louder, sticky-faced, paint-stained self who never apologised for the space she inhabited in a conversation or room. I’d write melodramatic journal entries of burying her in a graveyard by the beach, of wishing I could have apologised on her behalf. The memory of her, my younger self, became a punching bag on which all my present-day insecurities were projected.

That was my mistake, thinking my memory was a reflection of my past, rather than a sketch. 

Every time I clean my room and reconnect with old diaries, stories, photographs, and footage, I’m reminded of just how mistaken I was. I’m forever grateful—particularly now as I attempt to string together some story, some image of myself for you to read—to my bowerbird tendencies that left me with a nest of memorabilia. I think a part of me knew I would lose myself at some point and would need these trinkets, these writings, and these scribbles to capture fragments of myself in time; fragments I could eventually piece together. 

For a lot of my life, I was reminded of what a pain I was as a child (all in jest, but jokes have to come from somewhere). I was a pain to the point where none of my parents’ friends volunteered to babysit me, or if they did, they endured warnings or pats on the back for their brave sacrifice. Apparently, I just threw the worst tantrums. If something didn’t go my way, or I was thrown out of balance in the slightest, I would resign to screaming on the floor and never stopping. Honestly, if I had to babysit my younger self, I would resent it too. 

As I look back at my more recent writings, I find myself, again and again, writing about longing to scream, not just at the world, but also at myself. To be fair, what often immediately followed was an admittance that perhaps I was overreacting, that perhaps it really was just 3am and I needed to go to bed (which was often an accurate assumption). However, it did make me realise that this urge to scream, and I mean utterly howl in the most annoying and uncomfortable way, never really went away. If I could curl in a ball on the floor and scream my lungs off, I would. Obviously, I cannot and will not do that. For one, I’d look insane and more importantly, I’d piss people off. When we’re young, we often get away with a lot more just based on the assumption that we don’t know any better. Now, unfortunately, I know better.

However, on a trip to New York last year, I pretended I didn’t. Due to a concoction of reasons that I had bottled and let marinate for far too long, I found myself searching for soundproof studios for hire just so I could scream. When this idea fell through, I quite literally searched ‘where to scream in nyc’, with the top results just telling me to go for it in Central Park since the city is so big and no one really notices you anyway. Sadly, I’ve long lost my ability to scream unapologetically in public. Also, as I’ve alluded to previously, apologies are my thing and drawing attention is not. So, I resigned to screaming in the loudest place I could find. I ventured down to Chinatown, stood under the Manhattan Bridge on Madison street between Pike and Market, and screamed when the F-train passed. I decided that I’d let the world that’s made me want to scream also drown me out. It’s the least it could do. If I scream under a bridge but the subway is too loud for anyone to hear it, did I make a sound? 

Do I deserve to scream at all?

Funnily enough, screaming wasn’t the cure-all solution. I’m yet to find one, if it exists, but I did find something. As I sift through the diaries and drawings I archived long ago, I realised that tantrums weren’t all I was good for.

In just one of many half-finished journals, scribbled under lists of the foods I liked and disliked, were affirmations that I was enough. Piled beneath the oh-so-profound tales of potatoes that could fly and crime-fighting ninjas, was a story of a tree that outgrew the world so much that it touched space. While it cried at first, missing the friends it left behind, the tree soon realised that up in space, it would never be alone, for it had the stars. I had quite the obsession with trees. At the park by my house, there was a tree that, when I did a handstand, looked as if it was smiling. For that reason, naturally, it was my favourite, because it felt as if the tree and I had a secret. Although, this tree wasn’t hiding. It smiled all the time and was just waiting for a friend to linger a little longer and notice. Along the same vein, my uncle taught me to say ‘thank you’ to the flowers, leaves, and fruit I would pick as if they were my friends. I’m realising as I write this that I took quite a liking to things that photosynthesise. Perhaps I didn’t have as many friends as I thought in my formative years.

Of course, none of these stories or imaginings were articulated quite so fluently back then. However, with the magical lens of hindsight, I’d like to say there were some beginnings, some crumbs, of wisdom. 

When looking back at past writings, I realise she wasn’t someone to bury—my past self—but rather someone I needed to re-plant. I realised that it wasn’t hatred that I felt for her, but envy instead. My anxiety made me believe that I wasn’t deserving of rest until I could control every perception of myself that existed. I became so used to being small, and took pleasure in pleasing others with my amenability.  Suddenly, I found myself treading oh so lightly across a line drawn in the dust between who I was becoming and who I thought others expected me to be. 

Belittling oneself (not in the humbling sense) isn’t a unique experience, although often at times, it feels that way. This hyper-consciousness of how people are perceiving and constructing me in their minds became so natural, so intertwined with every public act and word that envy and bitterness was granted the space to grow; so subtly in fact that their source was obscured. For me, these vices weren’t directed towards others who seemed so open, bold and themselves, but rather towards my younger self, in all her awkward adolescence and social faux pas, in her tantrums and mistakes. I eventually grew tired of my amenability, of my kindness being mistaken for ignorance, of my softness being mistaken for peace. I built an ideal for myself that I assumed others also expected me to climb. I had become so much of a people pleaser, so painstakingly aware of those around me, of avoiding offence and humiliation, that I would, subconsciously, assemble my identity out of the eyes of others, rather than my own. 

That’s not to say that self-reflection and a little self-criticism is a bad thing. It’s sometimes only through the perceptions of others that you can see what parts of yourself need to change…as well as what parts are beautiful and must remain. That’s why I keep birthday cards, letters, passed-notes and postcards. They serve as a reminder to give those around me more credit; to steer the spotlight from my eyes and reschedule the end of the world, to see myself through eyes I can trust when mine fog over. 

Only through both realities—my past and present—can I assemble an accurate picture of myself. So, I’m grateful to have torn myself apart. It gave me the opportunity and the space to collage a version of myself that was tangible and messy, rather than mis-remembered, repulsed, and obscured.

Now, I give my younger self more grace remembering that she was just growing up. 

So, why can’t I grant my current self this same grace? Am I, too, not still growing?

I hesitated to write this. Perhaps because I know in a year or so, my perspective will most likely change. Perhaps I will look back at this piece of writing and wince. Although equally, there is the opportunity that I will look back and remind myself, once again, of who I was, am and will be, just as my stack of journals and photographs have done for me now. The only difference is that others now have access to this introspection. While it’s not the whole world, it’s still eyes I can’t control. However, this is a reality that exists everywhere, whether I write and reflect about it or not. So I might as well get used to it…or rather, let others get used to me and the many learnings and self-revisions that will inevitably occur. 

So, please also tear apart this story so that I can continue to grow. Please accept this patchwork of 3am ramblings and 3pm meditations, of words written when my mind was in a state of questioning, chaos, or quiet. It’s not the most profound of stories, but it still has a place, somewhere, hopefully. You’ve found your way to it at least. That’s something.