Writing sometimes can be fun but editing almost always is difficult or sometimes impossible

Why is this?

Because you have a 50-50 chance anytime you edit to harm or even completely destroy whatever you have written.

This is just reality.

You might one night write the end all be all of anything you ever wanted to write. And then the next moment or second you might do an edit that completely destroys what you have written and you will never get back that "perfect" writing that you did.

But, you might say, "Well. I always keep the original writings!"

Yes. That may be true but what happens when you have 10 or 20 versions of it? Can you still find your first draft to go back to it in an emergency?

So, protecting your perfect "children" writings is hard because sometimes you don't know how good what you have written actually is. Let's say you write it at 2 to 4 am in the morning and you are sort of up for it and then you fall asleep.

Then you forget you wrote that and it gets mixed in with something else you wrote that you really don't care about.

Then suddenly 1 month to 6 months to 2 years or 5 years from now you come across this and you see it is really amazing. The ideas solve the problems in your life that you are dealing with and gives you hope for your future when you might have had none that day for whatever the reason.

But, then you are sad that you wrote this wonderful thing and then forgot about it. But, sometimes if you try to edit that completely out of context from when you wrote it you now are a completely different person later than when you were when you wrote it. So now, if you even edit it in any way it likely will stop making any sense to you at all because you aren't the same person now because you have changed and are having completely different experiences now. You might have changed girl friends or moved to another place on earth and you  cannot get back to where you once were.

However, what you wrote was still perfect.

Question: Do you edit it knowing you likely are going to ruin it?

My answer often is: "NO. You leave it the way it is. Maybe you run it through a spell checker but mostly you leave it alone."

And you do this so you and whoever else reads it can read it and change their lives for the better too.