I have always loved language, both for its sake and for the places it can take me. Growing up, books were where I went for escape and for fulfillment, to dream big dreams and to feel less alone. I would spend entire days on the couch in my living room, wrapped up in blankets and enthralled by a book. My sibling and I, only one year apart in age, would share books, talking about them, dreaming about them and, of course, fighting over them. As I grew older, I began to write as well as read, inventing worlds to live in and new people to befriend. I grew up certain of my goals in the world. I wanted to be an author, and I wanted to be an editor.
Now, older and with new perspectives on my identity, I can see that words—that the written language itself—became my first special interest. I loved not only the stories that words could tell, but the way they sounded, their rhythms and cadences. I wrote poetry and speeches and essays. I fell in love over and over again with the English language. My autism lent me the superpower of hyperfocus, and I hyperfocused on writing and on words themselves. In high school, reading a dictionary for fun, I decided my favourite word was “quiddity”, an old, antiquated term for the essence of a thing. It did not matter that this was a word that no one used anymore. To me, it was a thing of beauty for its own sake, for the sounds it made when said and the meaning behind it.
Editing to me is a combination of all of the things I love and a celebration of the way my autistic brain works. It merges together my love for story with my love for language. I can fall into it easily, spending hours at my computer hardly noticing the passage of time. I love the minuteness of it as well as the big picture—the tiny details of grammar, the placement of a single comma, the catching of some tiny missing detail. It is a treasure hunt as much as it is anything else, and there is an element of editing that feels selfless. It allows me to let go of ego and to enter the world of somebody else, to help them shine for their own words and their own ideas. It is said that the best editors are invisible, and I truly believe this. It is my job to allow my authors to take to the stage in their most polished forms while I remain behind the curtain. In this way, editing allows me to be a part of other people’s journeys.
I truly believe that editing is important. Ideas are important, and editing can help those ideas shine. Editing is, in many ways, an equalizer. It ensures that people’s voices can be heard regardless of their abilities to put a comma in the right place or to memorize a thousand tiny rules of grammar. It champions stories. It gives people chances to shine. We all have a voice, even if not all of us know the correct use of a semi-colon. And we all deserve the chance to use those voices, to be heard. Editing, for me, is a way to help people do just that. And it doesn’t hurt that it allows me a chance to engage with my biggest special interest, to drink tea and sit at my desk by the window and learn more about the world.
Editing by Thistle 