Notice this: Paper, plastic or digital?
Updated: Oct 4
My paper is my past. And if you've ever tried to erase something from a piece of paper, you already know where I'm going with this. You can erase the words, sure, but hold that paper up to the light and there it is—the mark, the indentation, the little dirty smudge from where you rubbed the eraser back and forth trying to make something disappear. It never really goes back to what it was. Neither do we. And maybe we're not supposed to.
Hey, how are you doing? I'm sitting here on a beautiful, slightly chilly afternoon staring at some pine trees, thinking about life like I normally do. And something hit me today that I'm actually pretty damn grateful for: I like the person I'm becoming. That's a big statement for me. There was a younger version of me who didn't even think she'd live past 16. I certainly wasn't sitting around imagining that one day I'd grow into somebody I actually enjoyed hanging around with. But here I am. Sometimes I read one of my own blogs and think, Hey, I like this person. Then I remember... wait a minute. That's me. That's kind of wild when you've spent parts of your life not liking yourself very much.
Maybe that's why I think about weird things like paper, plastic and digital. If you've been around me for a while, you already know my mind doesn't exactly travel in a straight line. I can look at a coffee cup, a tree, a phone charger or a piece of paper and somehow end up having a full conversation with myself about life. But I believe you can learn from almost anything if you're willing to look deep enough. And I've got time to look, so why not? I've always believed that when life gives you a lot of something—time, experience, pain, love, knowledge, whatever—you should probably use some of it to grow something.
So let's start with the paper. My past. You can crumple paper up and then flatten it again, but those wrinkles don't disappear. You can put a book on it, iron it, smooth it with your hands, tell it positive affirmations if you want. That paper is still wrinkled. But here's the interesting part: those wrinkles give it texture. Have you ever seen beautiful handmade paper with rough edges, creases and imperfections? You want to touch it. You want to look closer because no two lines are exactly alike. Maybe our past is like that. Mine certainly is. My edges are worn.
I've got one of my old original birth certificates, and that thing has been through it. It's not sitting pretty inside some perfect plastic sleeve looking brand new. It's raggedy. It's fragile. One day I swear I'm going to pick it up and the poor thing is just going to whisper, Girl, I've had enough, and disintegrate right in my hands. Yes, I could replace it, but the replacement wouldn't be that piece of paper. And that's what the past is like. You don't replace it. You carry what it taught you.
Eventually, some of the feeling attached to the past starts to disintegrate too. The memory might remain, but the intensity can change. Some pain gets quieter when we actually move through it instead of building a house inside it. That's an important distinction. There have been times in my life when I thought I was processing something when really I had just gotten extremely comfortable sitting beside it. There's a difference. Eventually you've got to unfold the paper, look at the wrinkles, accept the stains and keep moving.
Which brings me to plastic. Plastic is my present. This one hit me while I was talking because that's usually how these things happen. I don't sit down with some giant philosophical blueprint. Half the time I'm discovering what I think while the words are coming out of my mouth. Plastic can be molded when you apply heat, and immediately I thought: heat is passion. Ooh. Now we're getting somewhere. As long as I've still got some fire inside me, I can reshape my life.
That's where I feel like I am right now. Molding, remolding, learning something, changing something, discovering something, screwing something up and trying again. I'm not trying to return to some original version of myself anymore. I'm working with the material I've got today. But plastic also taught me something else: too much heat burns it. And Lord, does burning plastic stink. That's passion too.
We love telling people to grind harder, want it more, push harder, hustle harder, keep going and never quit. Okay. But sometimes you need to move away from the damn flame. There is a difference between enough heat to reshape you and enough heat to destroy you. I've learned that passion doesn't always need to be a raging fire. Sometimes you just need enough warmth to become flexible again.
Because what you do in your present eventually becomes another piece of your paper. That's worth remembering. Today's decisions are tomorrow's wrinkles. Today's habits are tomorrow's stories. Today's relationships, reactions, risks, mistakes and beautiful little victories are all quietly becoming history while we're busy calling them Tuesday.
And then there's digital. Digital is my future. Now this one fascinates me. Digital doesn't exist the same way paper does. You can't hold tomorrow in your hands. It's possibility. It's information. It's instructions. It's input. And increasingly, it's prompts. Isn't that interesting? We are living in a world obsessed with prompts now. Ask the right question, give the right instruction, input the right information and something gets generated. And I started wondering... haven't humans always worked a little like that?
What am I repeatedly telling myself? What am I feeding my mind? What questions am I asking? What beliefs am I carrying forward? What am I programming into tomorrow through what I repeatedly do today? Maybe my future is being coded by my present. My paper gave me information. My plastic gives me the ability to reshape that information. And digital represents the possibility of creating something that hasn't existed yet.
That doesn't mean I erase the paper. I can't. And I don't think I want to anymore. Those wrinkles contain information. The mistakes contain information. The heartbreak contains information. The joy contains information. Even the versions of myself I don't particularly want to revisit taught me something about the woman sitting here today looking at pine trees and realizing, Damn. I actually like her. That's worth something.
And then my mind wandered into money because apparently we're going everywhere today. Think about it. Money itself has gone through a similar journey: paper, plastic, digital. We once physically held much more of our money. Then came cards. Now numbers move across screens while we trust that somewhere inside a giant invisible system those numbers still belong to us. Funny how much of modern life works on trust. Funny how much of the future always has.
Maybe that's why the digital part of life can feel scary. We can't touch what's coming. We can't hold tomorrow. We can't put the future in our pocket and check that it's still there. We can only influence it through what we're doing now. Maybe that's the real prompt.
So I'm asking myself—and maybe you can ask yourself too—how's your paper? Are you still trying to iron every wrinkle out of something that was never meant to become perfectly smooth again? How's your plastic? Do you have enough passion to reshape something in your life without setting yourself on fire trying to do it? And what are you programming into your digital future? What are you repeatedly feeding your mind? What are you carrying forward? What needs to stay in the archives? What are your intuitive prompts telling you that you've been pretending not to hear?
I don't have some perfect answer for you. Hell, I started this conversation thinking about paper. But that's what I love about thinking. You follow one thought long enough and sometimes it introduces you to another version of yourself. My paper is wrinkled. My plastic is still being molded. And my digital future? I'm still writing the prompts. Maybe you are too.
So don't throw away your past trying to prove you've healed from it. Don't burn yourself up trying to reshape your present. And don't become so afraid of an unwritten future that you forget you're already feeding information into it every single day.
I'm going for my walk now, like I normally do. If something in this made you stop and think, come visit Cellphellow.com and check out my $1.99 series about navigating these strange days from my perspective. I'm not promising to solve your life. Nobody should be promising you that. But maybe something there helps you see another door, another question or another possibility you hadn't considered yet.
We're all standing on somebody's shoulders. May we reach high enough to see a little farther. May we learn enough from the paper to mold the plastic wisely. And may we become conscious of what we're programming into whatever comes next. Take care of you. One love—and Ashe for the ancestors. Self-love and self-care will get you there.
— QueenB.Divine
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