Redacted Naratives

Unless one has been living under a rock one has heard the word redaction. It sounds official, procedural, almost responsible. Documents are released, transparency is declared, and then entire paragraphs look like they lost a fight with a black marker. Nobody says the document is false; they simply insist that some parts are “not relevant at this time,” which is a polite way of saying the truth has been rearranged into something emotionally convenient. What is fascinating is how perfectly this practice migrates into relationships, where people do not technically speak falsehoods, they just distribute edited versions of reality, and everyone pretends the missing sections never existed. Now imagine if every communication between two people suddenly appeared in its original form, no cropping, no selective memory, no curated narrative for public consumption, and this is possible with people like me who are archivists by the nature of their work – nothing is ever deleted – everything is saved as data; a few individuals clinging to fragments would immediately realize that the story they were handed is basically a highlight reel with half the context quietly erased, and that realization would not feel like enlightenment, it would feel like the last brick tied to the ankle before the boat finally sinks. The genius of relational redaction is that it rarely invents anything new; it simply darkens the parts that complicate the present. A call becomes “just a phase,” a history becomes “overthinking,” loyalty becomes “intensity,” and suddenly the ecosystem looks neat and morally flattering. Enter the newcomer, stage left, armed with absolute certainty and approximately zero curiosity. The newcomer receives the redacted document and treats it like sacred scripture, never once pausing to ask why entire timelines feel strangely compressed, why certain names disappear mid-sentence, why the emotional architecture they are standing inside seems suspiciously pre-built. Instead of asking questions, the newcomer does what the intellectually deficient do best: they assume the version handed to them is complete, because asking questions would require admitting they might not understand everything yet, and nothing terrifies a newcomer more than the possibility that they are late to a story already written by someone else. So they live comfortably inside their glossy summary, proud owners of a narrative that feels clean precisely because the mess has been edited out. Meanwhile, the people who have own the unredacted version watch with a peculiar kind of amusement. They know who called every night before the calls stopped. They know when conversations were long and unscripted before they disappeared. They know the chapters that are now covered in thick emotional ink. They do not have to shout or argue; they simply exist as walking evidence that the document used to be longer. And that existence makes them dangerous, not because they fabricate anything, but because the evidence they possess exposes the editing process. The newcomer reacts predictably. Instead of questioning the redaction, it questions the witnesses. The archivists become “negative,” the historians become “stuck,” and the people who remember too much are quietly removed from the official narrative so the newcomer never has to confront the possibility that their perfect understanding rests on a heavily censored file. The real comedy lies in the newcomer’s confident stupidity and ignorance. Armed with a document missing entire emotional paragraphs, they speak with the authority of someone who believes they have seen everything. They never ask why certain reactions seem disproportionate. They never ask why some people smile politely and say nothing. They never wonder why timelines feel oddly smooth, like a biography written by a public relations firm. Instead, they declare themselves informed, enlightened even, blissfully unaware that their certainty is built on absence. It is not malicious stupidity; it is the special kind of stupidity that thrives when asking questions might destabilize comfort. And the system rewards it, because an unquestioning newcomer is easier to manage than a curious one. Redaction is about protecting a present that cannot survive full context. The one who has seen or owns the unredacted document remain inconvenient reminders that the story did not begin where the newcomer thinks it did. And because the one who has the full document is a threat, they are slowly erased from conversations, excluded from updates, described as problematic simply for possessing memory. The newcomer, still clutching their edited script, never notices the disappearance. They assume silence equals agreement, that absence equals irrelevance, never realizing that the people who have seen the whole document are simply waiting for the moment when the missing sections begin to leak through the margins. Because eventually they always do. Black ink fades. Timelines wobble. And when that happens, the newcomer will discover something deeply unsettling: the truth was never hidden from them by enemies, it was hidden by their own refusal to ask the obvious question — what exactly has been redacted, and why was I so comfortable not knowing? It is at that moment that the poet of our lives, Leonard Cohen, comes alive in his song, "Everybody knows."