The Unedited Self: On the Courage of an Outdated 'About' Page
I found a fossil of myself today, preserved in the digital amber of my own website. It was the 'About' page. The header image was a photo I hadn’t used in years, my hair a different length, my expression a shade more optimistic. The bio spoke of projects long since abandoned and aspirations that had since cooled into different, quieter realities. It listed an old title, a city I no longer lived in. The page was, by every metric of content freshness, a failure. It was a stagnant pool in a forest I kept meticulously weeded elsewhere.
My first instinct, the webmaster’s ingrained reflex, was to reach for the edit button. To prune, to update, to align this public-facing persona with the current, more accurate version of me. To perform the necessary maintenance of self. But my cursor hovered, and then stopped. There was a strange honesty in that outdated text, a vulnerability that felt more authentic than any polished, up-to-the-minute summary I could possibly write.
We treat our personal pages as living documents, and for good reason. They are our shop fronts. But in our rush to maintain a facade of constant relevance, we often erase the evidence of our own becoming. We sand down the rough edges of our past selves, creating a seamless, and ultimately fictional, narrative of continuous progress. That old bio wasn’t a lie; it was just a chapter I’d closed. To update it wasn’t to correct a falsehood, but to hide a truth—the truth that I had changed.
Leaving it untouched became a quiet act of rebellion against the tyranny of the perpetual present. It is a marker, a cairn on the trail of my own life, indicating where I was, not where I am. It allows a visitor, perhaps, to see not just the product but a piece of the process. It admits fallibility, acknowledges a past that was once a fervent present. There is a courage in that. A willingness to be seen as a work-in-progress that includes discarded drafts and abandoned paths.
So it stays. The photo, the old city, the shelved ambitions. They are not weeds in my garden, but rather the hardy perennials of a former season, their faded blooms a testament to what once grew there. The page is not stale; it is archival. Its value isn’t in its current utility, but in its faithful recording of a moment that was true, a self that was real. Sometimes, the most profound update is the decision not to make one, to let a small part of the web stand as a monument to who you were, giving depth and texture to who you are.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: