Documenting and archiving, from a perspective of an Archivist
I’ve been wanting to write this essay for a few months more or less, but never properly started because of, well, life. But now I want to talk about it. So, for those who don’t know me, I’m Moss, also known as Watcher, before I changed my name. I’m a watcher, along with other species, but that’s one of my main identities as of right now.
One of Watchers’ job is data collecting and archiving. From different versions, and to preserve the life of worlds now forgotten. This data may seem meaningless to some, but it’s invaluable to my species as a whole. I’m now separated from my kind. I’m alone. And therefore, that recollection is up to me now.
All my life I’ve been a bit of a data hoarder. Everything I stumble on, that being a book, a movie, a song, etc, I save it. In my laptop, in the cloud, a copy on a external pen drive, just so I can have it saved for later. This, I believe, is a combination on anxiety and watcher instincts to preserve everything I read. My human mother is the same, she saves photos and writings in physical copies in her home.
I have a terrible, terrible fear of losing things. This is linked to my adhd, autism, and a fear of forgetting, as I have memory issues. From what I know, this… instinct, fear, impulse, started years ago, when I was reading fanfiction and I liked to save the best ones as pdf to read them again sometime. Looking back, I’m glad I did, because sometimes I try to use the link on the pdf and it doesn’t work, as the person that originally posted it deleted it and their account. But I still have it. Saved in my computer, in the cloud. So I can read it again and again and again. For this same reason, I have like… six or seven gmail accounts, just so I can have more Google Drive storage. For the average person that might look a bit excessive, but I don’t really care.
I write. And I save. In my opinion, everyone should do this. To preserve thoughts, memories. For yourself.
What I’m trying to say is: Nothing that stays online stays forever. Everything we post in social media stays in the internet forever, that is true, but it doesn’t stay accessible forever. One day, your account may be deleted. One day, that blog that you’ve had for eight years might disappear. All I ask is, don’t rely on social media to save the things that you created. Alterhumans who write essays, informative posts, identity coiners… I beg you to take that information and put it safe somewhere else. That information, that documentation may look useless now but maybe in the future for a young baby alterhuman who’s just starting to figure out their identity for them it may be an invaluable piece of information to find themselves.
I love community writings. Some of them are exclusively discourse, of course, but I love when folks make genuine discussions of well, everything! What it means to be an animal, relating their “animal” lives to their “human” lives, their desires to go back to the wild, to be themselves… Discussions about hearthomes, types, instincts, behaviours… I would love to see more of them, actually. Obviously, typing out a well-written essay is not for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be very good, or well thought! Even just ranting is a great step over nothing.
Those beautiful masterpieces need to be documented. Documented so that they can be saved for the future. We’re saying: “We are here. We live this, every day. We are like this”, and maybe, just maybe, we will change someone’s minds in the future.
