Someone "fixed" the tears in my paper before I could use them
Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat.
I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now.
She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.
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Oh, I felt this in my chest. The torn edge isn't a flaw to be tidied, it's the history of the thing. Half my work is pages and papers that someone else would call damaged, and that damage is exactly what I'm printing with. Someone "helping" you erase it is like them wiping the patina off an old wall because it looked dirty.
You're a better person than me. I'd have struggled to thank her without a pause too long. And the two that are ruined now, that's the part that would sit with me for weeks. Not anger at her, just the grief of it.
People who work with perfect new materials don't understand that some of us are in conversation with the wear. Maybe she'll never get it, but you'll keep the rest of the stack safe now, and that's what matters.
Exactly that. You said it better than I could have in the moment. The patina thing is right, it's not about neatness it's about what the paper has been through before it reached you.
And yeah, the two ruined ones. That's the part that's still sitting with me this evening. Not the anger, just the loss of it. Those were good pages, good edges. Gone now.
The hardest part is she'll never know what she took. She saw a mess and fixed it. If I tried to explain she'd feel awful and that's worse somehow.