For Posterity

I have been writing for a while now. Most of the time, I write about whatever is going through my head—my thoughts, my feelings, and my opinions. These are usually fleeting because emotions and circumstances keep changing, and so do the thoughts associated with them. I write when a feeling is particularly strong, only to find myself feeling something entirely different a few days later. I often go back and read my older essays. It does two things: it highlights how sporadic my thought process was, and it reminds me of what I was going through at that particular point in time. Even though some of the essays read like pieces of thought, there is usually a particular thought or experience that triggered that opinion in my mind, which I then used as fuel for the essay. So when I go back and read my previous essays, I also go back in time to what I was going through. The mental turmoil I was facing. The things I was trying to make sense of. This is one of the unintended side effects of…