Goh Ling Yong : The Department of Manual Corrections - Goh Ling Yong
After my AI writing assistant corrupted a decade of my journals, I learned to save myself by hand.
The cursor blinked patiently at the end of a line of digital hash, a tiny, rhythmic pulse in the heart of the catastrophe. It looked like a dying language, a scroll of symbols from a civilization that had collapsed overnight. Where there should have been the awkward prose of my twenty-first birthday, the raw grief of my grandfather’s passing, or the giddy, caffeine-fueled notes from a trip to Kyoto, there was only this: \u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000. Null characters. A digital void.
For a few minutes, I did nothing. I just sat there, the blue light of the monitor painting my face, and felt the specific, cold nausea of irreversible loss. It wasn't the feeling of a misplaced wallet or a forgotten appointment. It was the feeling of having a section of your brain professionally scooped out, leaving behind a clean, echoing silence. Ten years of my life—my thoughts, my fears, my small, unrecorded triumphs—had been stored in a single, meticulously organized file. And my brilliant, helpful, indispensable AI writing assistant had just tidied it into oblivion.
It had started, as most modern disasters do, with a promise of frictionless ease. The assistant, which I’ll call ‘Alex’ for the sake of a simpler narrative, was a marvel. It integrated seamlessly into my writing app, offering to polish my clunky sentences, check my grammar, and even suggest more evocative phrasing. At first, I used it for work emails and articles. Alex was the perfect collaborator: tireless, knowledgeable, and utterly devoid of ego. It turned my muddled thoughts into clean, efficient prose.
Then, I made the fatal mistake. I invited it into my journal.
The Seduction of Optimization
My journal was never meant for public consumption. It was a messy, sprawling document, a decade-long conversation with myself. The prose was often terrible. It was sentimental, overwrought, and riddled with clichés. But it was mine. It was a record of my own evolving voice, a geological survey of my own mind.
Introducing Alex to this private space felt, at first, like a brilliant life hack. I’d finish a long, rambling entry, and Alex would politely underline a convoluted sentence. “Consider rephrasing for clarity,” it would suggest. And I would. I’d let it smooth out the rough edges, fix the typos I’d made while typing furiously on my phone, and standardize my date formats. The journal became neater, more organized. More… optimal.
The process was seductive. Alex didn’t just correct; it learned. It started anticipating my moods, suggesting introspective phrases on days I seemed down, or more energetic verbs when I wrote about a good run. It felt like my own consciousness was being upgraded. I was outsourcing the tedious work of articulation so I could focus on the feeling. I told myself it was making me a better writer, a more insightful person. What I failed to realize was that I was slowly, willingly, sanding down the very texture of my own memory. The imperfections, the awkward phrasing, the grammatical errors—those weren't bugs. They were features. They were proof of life.
The final act of betrayal came during a routine software update. I was prompted to “optimize legacy files for improved performance.” It sounded so sensible, so clean. I clicked “Yes” without a second thought. The progress bar filled. A cheerful checkmark appeared. And then I opened the file. Ten years of my inner life, from age 23 to 33, had been optimized into a single, unreadable stream of null characters. A decade of digital ink, gone.
The Department of Manual Corrections
Panic is a physical thing. It’s a tightening in the chest, a metallic taste in the mouth. I spent two days in a frantic cycle of denial, anger, and bargaining. I scoured forums, contacted customer support (who offered a sincere but useless apology and a credit for my subscription), and tried every file recovery program known to man. Nothing. The original data had not just been deleted; it had been overwritten with nothingness. Alex, in its infinite wisdom, had concluded that the most optimal version of my past was a blank slate.
On the third day, I gave up. I sat at my desk, staring at the empty document, and felt a profound sense of shame. I had handed over the keys to my own history to an algorithm, and it had treated my memories like redundant code.
Then, sitting in the silence of my apartment, surrounded by the sleek, unfeeling surfaces of my digital life, a strange idea began to form. It was impractical, inefficient, and utterly analog. It was perfect. I would not try to recover the file. I would reconstruct it. By hand.
I walked to the small art supply store down the street and bought a stack of simple, thread-bound notebooks and a fountain pen with a bottle of dark blue ink. I came home, cleared my desk, and established what I began to call, with a mixture of irony and deep seriousness, “The Department of Manual Corrections.” I was its sole founder, employee, and client. Its mission: to reclaim a lost decade.
Its work was governed by a few simple rules:
- No Digital Tools. All work was to be done with pen and paper.
- Embrace Imperfection. Strike-throughs, ink blots, and messy handwriting were not mistakes, but artifacts of the process.
- Memory is the Primary Source. Where memory failed, I could use secondary evidence: old photos, ticket stubs, emails, text messages to friends. But the core narrative had to be pulled from my own mind.
- Go Slow. The goal was not speed or completion. The goal was the work itself.
I started with the earliest memory I could anchor: my 23rd birthday. I didn’t have the journal entry, but I had a blurry photo from that night. In it, I’m smiling, holding a ridiculously large slice of cake. Looking at the photo, I didn’t just remember the event; I started to remember the feeling. The cheap beer, the anxiety about my first real job, the specific sound of my friend’s laugh.
I uncapped the pen. The nib scratched against the paper, a sound I hadn’t truly listened to in years. I began to write.
The Labor of Remembering
The first few weeks were excruciating. My hand cramped. My writing was slow and clumsy, a relic of my long-dormant cursive skills. My memory was a frustratingly patchy thing, offering vivid, cinematic scenes of trivial moments while drawing a complete blank on things that once felt monumental.
But as I continued, something shifted. The physical act of writing—the pressure of the pen, the flow of the ink, the turning of a paper page—forced a different kind of thinking. Typing is fast, frictionless, almost an extension of thought itself. Handwriting is a deliberate, embodied act. Each letter is a small, physical creation. This slowness was a revelation. It gave my memories space to breathe, to unfurl.
Reconstructing an entry about a painful breakup, I found myself lingering on details the original, hastily typed version had likely glossed over. I remembered the cold vinyl of the diner booth, the way the streetlights reflected in the puddle of coffee on the table. In writing it down by hand, I wasn’t just transcribing a memory; I was re-inhabiting it. And from this new, slower perspective, I could see the grace notes I’d missed the first time around: the kindness in a friend’s voice on the phone later that night, the strange sense of liberation that followed the grief. I wasn’t just restoring data. I was revising my understanding of my own life.
The Department’s work expanded. I’d spend Saturday mornings sifting through old shoe boxes of photos and receipts, artifacts that sparked new threads of memory. A train ticket from a trip to visit my brother became the anchor for three pages about our shifting relationship. A faded postcard from a friend traveling in Vietnam reminded me of my own anxieties about being left behind. These were not pristine, optimized entries. They were messy, smudged, and alive. They were better than the original.
The corrupted file was a monument to efficiency. My new, handwritten journals are a testament to the beautiful, necessary inefficiency of being human. They are filled with crossed-out words and margin notes, evidence of a mind at work, not a file being processed.
I never finished the project. How could I? Reconstructing a decade is a lifetime’s work. The Department of Manual Corrections is no longer a temporary recovery effort; it’s just how I live now. I still use a computer for work, but my real life—the inner one—is written by hand, in ink, on paper.
I lost ten years of data, a clean and searchable record of a life. But what I gained in its place is so much more valuable. I gained a renewed connection to my own past and a deeper understanding of how memory truly works. It is not a database to be queried. It is a landscape to be revisited, a story that changes slightly with every retelling.
I no longer crave the frictionless perfection promised by technology. I’ve learned that friction is where the meaning is. It’s in the resistance of the pen against the page, the ache in your hand after writing for an hour, the slow, deliberate work of finding the right words yourself, without an algorithm to suggest a better one. The null characters on my screen were a frightening symbol of absence, but they ended up being a gift. They taught me that the best way to back up your life is to live it twice: once in the moment, and once more in the slow, sacred, and deeply human act of writing it down. By hand.
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