panopticon in my tummy and other grievances with self voyeurism

on archiving, documentation, journaling and the crushing weight of perception

ok so this is quick one. i have had a thing for archiving since i was a child. i wanted to be a bad bitch with a coin collection at the age of six and i had been nowhere but my best friend’s backyard so i made my father buy me a coin set from around the world, it did not feel half as gratifying as i thought it would, consumerist filth. but i was small town trash and i had to make do. then i imposed upon my father to start a seashell collection, we went to the beach a lot so that was doable. i would pick up every seashell ever on the seashore, i was committed to the bit (the tongue twister girl) so i laboriously collected and collected and collected only to never find the zip loc bag of seashells amiss, i have retained the visual memory of the drawer i stuffed it in, but unlike my many childhood moments of repression, it is gone. from seashells it was textbook labels and then it was bookmarks, but as it so happens, i lost so much as i moved, my collection of goosebumps was lost to the local orphanage as we moved. i say ‘lost’ because my father just tossed it all out at once without asking me and it deeply pained me as a child. that was the first crucial moment of loss for me, i had lost my love birds, my grandfather, a friend to dengue, but nothing felt as colossal as the loss of a material possession so dear to me. in the same vein, i sobbed when i misplaced my carefully written curation of journals from when i was 10, i would read them extensively after i wrote them, the self-voyeurism began early as i forced myself out of my body and relegated myself to the role of the bystander. this manifested in the sacrosanct act of journaling, i would heavily editorialize and proofread my journal entries, while maintaining their integrity as authentic accounts, at the age of 12, i would find myself annotating past entries, i had to then move to a blog because overwriting journal entries felt a bit overbearing, even for a child like me. the other reason to abandon the holy grail of journaling was because as i grew up, my mother lost her grasp on reality and the many norms of privacy, i was always writing for a spectator, an overbearing reader, a questionable audience, my mother. so my final act of journaling was a fabricated teenage boyfriend that only riled her beyond measure, the annotations in my diary were plenty that day, and none of them, were mine.

perception mandated my life going on, i archived relentlessly for the better part of my childhood and early teenage years, archiving as a way to be believed was one of my many concerns. i amused myself with a pathological obsession of keeping record, in my several squabbles with my mother, i began documenting these fights like a sharp stenographer strictly adhering to her work, typing away the origin, the details, the retaliatory nature of conversations, i was documenting landmines so i could hang a piece of paper in front of the mother superior and pray to god she remembered. she did not, in fact my documentation riled her up more, so i documented that too. in the trenches of isolation, there isn’t much to do but ceaselessly frame your perception, holding onto a box of letters, old pictures, lip balms and miscellaneous items became an elaborate ritual of collecting. maybe it was a way to leave behind a map, one that would uncover a posthumous cabinet of curiosities.

this is the inception of it all, a graphic memory, laughable blogging skills, unrestricted computer access, and a neurotic whimsy to store and wither. my nascent love for detective stories like Nancy Drew morphed into understanding the titbits my mother collected, discovering a file full of my nursery report cards as an adult did a number on me. in another file, were all the corny friendship bracelets i collected as a child every single year, there was a birth certificate to prove that i existed beyond the ambit of my perception, and there was a file full of shiny medals, collected through the course of primary school. my mother rarely documented, apart from her now nowhere to be found Facebook albums, she had stashed away a shrine of my childhood relic, so carefully organized in folders, i could never. i would pick apart photographs from albums and CDs from the CD file to make my own contraband, when life would turn out to be shaky and violent, i would peruse through my spoils to remind myself that i exist. a detective building a repository of clues, tracing back to the one glaring inference - i exist!!!

i am 21 now, archiving has mutated and metamorphosized into so many shapeshifting forms, i document, i write in a matte leather book riddled with confusing inquiries, in the absence of pen and paper, i reproduce my thoughts onto my notes app like a committed cultural critic, i obsessively take photographs of the world unfolding around me because what else does perception do but warp your identity into a condensed digital category of niches and paraphernalia, i find refuge in google docs, i remember how it went down because i remember everything and it was a curse, i did not take a photograph of the cut because it would be a logistical nightmare to document something so up close, so i wrote everything down, because being seen is all i have, i wrote down the complex feelings i felt at the time and i remember what i was wearing, i remember the joke and i remember the gist, we are still talking and i am smoking a cigarette and i am stubbing it away on my skin and i am writing it down, wrenching out the details, isolating the details in the borders of a document, speaking of it never again, until many years later, and documentation then just becomes the wound and blotch that forms after something harrowing happens, just a desperate desperate plea to be seen, to wish for more lacerations so the wretchedness of an ill meaning boy is better apparent, yes i took a picture and it is lost forever, still.

my life has sobered since then, since then, i have been more intent on propelling the pangs of violence and rush into the light, dragging across the carcasses of my past into technicolor light and forcing them to be investigated under the scalpel, my life barely looks like lacerations, internal bleeding, bruises and punches anymore. that seems like a lifetime ago, i kept keepsakes of most of it, some have been lost to the embedded fold of time and some, deliberately handed over to the city’s beloved trashcans. i think of my mother and i think of the women that came before, their fine blueprints of archiving, their torturous journals, their trinkets of rocks and well loved jewels, their carousel of images, the violent and messy details of some of the most terrible women to have ever lived, scorned women, bored women, hedonistic women, suffering women, blasé women, infidel women, lonely women, do i make the cut, can i join the ranks of kinship i so desperately looked for as a child?

i document still, i find it amusing that every once in a while i will open up instagram and will be like ‘this is my friend, for the 30th time this week’ or ‘i think you should all look at my beverage of choice today :-)’. i love taking a picture of ratatouille and writing did a rat make this? it is a dilly dallying i enjoy and thoroughly partake in. then there is some documentation that feels too private for it to be subjected to a microscopic eye, must i gate keep the silhouette of a lover’s hand carefully crafted, must the dried flower in my purse see the light of the night internet, must the catalogue of an intimate day be protected from the throes of perception?

i wonder then about the predecessors of my documentation, the blood on a few letters, the cigarette stubs, the questionable photographs, the many souvenirs of a cold body left to be scrubbed in vain? does that make sense? i love my life now and i loved it then, even in the throes of concealed violence, i was committed to documenting it. i was invested in it all, and i am invested in my life now. as a child, i thought all the pain in the grand scheme of things made me important and interesting, i am a 21 year old woman now, and i am interesting, not because of the wounded’s artifacts collected, there is so much more to tell, even in the midst of surfacing rage and hidden stories. i no more have to tell them to be believed, the violence of being a woman is forever enmeshed in our flesh and bones, one cannot escape it, regardless of the staggering webs of terror that is a teenage body susceptible to psychosexual horror of the highest order. i document now because i exist, there is no lacuna of proof lying on the back of my shoulders, giving me a hunch, a hot girl cannot afford a hunch, so i document everything, the walk on a random Sunday evening, that little postcard i gifted a friend, the first page of a gripping novel, the bill from a date, the visit to the grocery store, the banal trip to the obgyn that yields no new information, i document it all because i have surpassed the wailing defeated yelp to be believed, my documentation has ceased to mark my mark but as a whimsical continuance on life itself, i document because i am a woman who revels in the anguish and the profane joys of everyday life, my life is still important at the bookstore, my life is still of note at the miscellaneous smoke shop, my life is still of consequence at the local convenience store. my life is especially of substance, even when it is bereft of violence, especially when it is devoid of violence. it is a crime scene and i cannot look away, i am absorbing every moment in because i want to enjoy the carnal act of archiving for the sake of archiving, no ulterior motives this time around.

perception is still a bitch and i will not bore you with the Atwood male fantasy reading all over again because god knows the internet is saturated with it, desire is still violence and my body is constantly at odds with itself, the debris of the past in the form of mementos often visits my dreams every now and then and while things are much calmer now, the specter of the panopticon from within haunts us all! in this inevitable process of self surveillance and mutation, i cannot help but commit to the bit of being a full fledged woman, peeping out the window, submerging myself in other people’s storylines even it means the briefest screen time for little old me.