I was deep into proofreading a client’s book draft about the early years of the internet, the kind of meticulous work that pays the bills between translation projects. After the author’s preface, I turned to the opening chapter.
There, staring back at me from the text, was my own name. Not as the proofreader, but as the subject. Ramon Stoppelenburg. Letmestayforaday.com. The Dutch “digital adventurist” who had embarked on what the author called “a revolutionary global journey.”
For a moment, I forgot I was supposed to be checking grammar and fixing typos. Instead, I was reading about my younger self, the guy who, over TWENTY FIVE YEARS ago, created a website that would become what UNESCO now recognizes as Digital Heritage. The same person who had relied entirely on strangers’ kindness for accommodation, documenting every day with photos and stories that somehow captivated a global audience. I had lots of hair, too!
It’s surreal, seeing your past life described as “groundbreaking” and “pioneering” when you’re currently focused on ensuring proper comma placement and smooth sentence flow. The manuscript described how Letmestayforaday.com had “laid conceptual groundwork for later social networking and hospitality platforms”, words that make something I lived through sound almost mythical.
This is the peculiar intersection where my professional life sometimes collides with my personal history. One day I’m translating technical documents from Dutch to English, the next I’m proofreading books that happen to mention my own digital adventures. It’s a reminder that in our interconnected world, the lines between our various identities, past and present, subject and editor, can blur in the most unexpected ways.
The irony isn’t lost on me: I’ve gone from being a “trailblazer in demonstrating the internet’s potential for real-world adventure” to someone who ensures other people’s words about internet adventures are properly spelled and punctuated. 🙂
But maybe that’s just another kind of digital adventure, helping to preserve and polish these stories for future readers, even when one of those stories happens to be your own.