hold on to this?

Having shredded much of my paper life, I feel freer now, free to try, however hopelessly, to look back at a life from the cool perspective of an historian rather than that of a passionate diarist.  Free, not so much to invent, but to inject an honesty that perhaps was never there.  A clarity that can only come from a distance, from having lived, from having forgotten and forgiven, from having once held tight and now let go.  The irony of having shredded a paper life is that I feel an immediate urge to put it back together again, in a form, this time, that illuminates.