Stet, or the art of leaving yourself alone

By A&E Editor Kayla Li

Forever 21, and the city knows it. In the version of my life I return to most often, New York is already warm when I leave my apartment. Somebody is waiting downstairs, and somebody else is texting the address of a bar I’ve never been to. There are rooftops I remember from their lighting and cocktail menus filled with words I mispronounce confidently. 21 seems like a good age to remain. I would take 19, actually. 19 has a certain tragic glamour to it, forever balanced on the last year of being a teenager, if not for the irritating fact that I could not legally drink, which ruins the fantasy considerably. 21 it is. 

Maybe I am Anna Wintour in another life. In this one, I would at least like an internship at Milan Fashion Week, opinions about whatever is showing at Palais de Tokyo, Bemelmans on an otherwise undeserving Tuesday, friends who become inseparable from certain streets. But the same future also contains long stretches where I want everyone to leave me alone: a small apartment, freelance work open on my laptop, and whole afternoons with nowhere to be. The fantasy is greedy. It wants noise and privacy, a crowded table and the pleasure of going home from it. 

For a long time, I assumed these contradictions meant I had not imagined myself carefully enough. One version would eventually prove more authentic and absorb the others, leaving behind someone consistent enough to explain. Growing up, I assumed, was convergence. That expectation followed me into smaller things, too.

A conversation ends and, hours later, one sentence comes back wrong. I replay the pause after it, the half-smile, where their eyes went when I was speaking. Why did I say that? By then the memory is mostly fiction, but no matter. I continue drawing a police sketch from scraps. I know how ridiculous this is because I am fluent in the opposite advice. Nobody cares! Wear it. Send it. Ask. Go. People are thinking about themselves, not you. Then I go home and conduct the autopsy.

 I edit for the Smoke Signal, so perhaps I have acquired an editor’s pathology. Editing teaches you to be suspicious; a sentence is rarely innocent. A word can be cleaner. A sentence can be tighter. This paragraph would really be better up there. There is, thankfully, a mark for the opposite instinct — stet. From Latin: let it stand. An editor marks something for correction, then changes their mind and writes stet. Ignore me. Put it back. Four severe little letters, for what is essentially: actually, nevermind. Well, I am terrible at it. The problem is that an editor’s instinct has poor boundaries. Don’t seem too excited, don’t be the person who cares more, don’t talk about something long enough for people to understand how much you love it. Nobody gave me these instructions. I wrote the stylebook myself.

It is a species of perfectionism less interested in being perfect than in being legible. I would simply like to make sense. Unfortunately, modern life has a great appetite for summaries — intended major, MBTI, Spotify Wrapped. If Spotify can turn an entire year of listening into five artists and a pleasant little taxonomy, surely I should be able to do something similar with myself. But I know what happens when you edit writing toward perfect coherence. First goes the strange sentence, then the sentimental one, god forbid you are anything other than nonchalant. Eventually, the paragraph becomes smooth, competent, and attributable to anyone. The same hand that removes the error can remove the pulse. 

The person I was at 12 loved things I no longer love and believed things I no longer believe. I used to think of her as a rough draft, full of awkward phrasing and structural issues, but, all things considered, showing promise. How condescending. A draft exists because a final version is expected, but she was not waiting to become me. Whatever she loved, she loved in the present tense.

Maybe growing up is closer to accumulation:  you do not arrive at one self so much as acquire a strange archive of them, each speaking, for a while, in present tense. Maybe I get the New York life. Maybe I discover that bars are mostly sticky tables and shouting over songs I dislike. Maybe at 25 I read this and find the whole fantasy impossibly young. That would not make it any less true.

  I have edited this while writing about editing myself. Some sentences disappeared because they were bad; others because they sounded too sincere. Eventually, though, a personal piece has to leave you. Somebody reads it without you hovering over their shoulder providing footnotes and clarification. Maybe they think something is embarrassing, maybe they misunderstand a sentence. More likely, they finish and move on. Nobody cares. Stet.