Yesterday I spent the entire day working on my new book. This is the second book I have written, but the process has been completely different from the first one.

With my first book, I had to go inside my memory. I made a timeline, divided my life into events, tried to remember places, conversations, feelings and moments. I was looking backwards and asking myself what I could still find there.

This time I didn’t have to rely only on memory, because before I could even start writing I had to collect the material: eight months of conversations, messages, voice notes that had to be transcribed, WhatsApp chats, emails, dates, things I had written at the exact moment something was happening and things other people had written to me.

Different conversations had to be put next to each other so I could understand what happened and when. It has been an enormous amount of work and, technically, I haven’t even started writing the book yet. I have simply been building the archive of it.

Yesterday I finally finished, and when I did, I felt sick. Not metaphorically. I felt nauseous. I think there is something very different about living something over eight months and reading those same eight months compressed into a much shorter period of time.

When you live it, there are spaces in between. You wake up, you go shopping, you work, you eat something, you walk somewhere, maybe you have a good day, then something happens, and then another ordinary day comes along. Life creates pauses between events.

But when you go back and collect everything, those pauses disappear. Everything sits next to everything else. It was almost like watching a film of a period of my own life, except I already knew every scene. Things that had happened weeks apart were suddenly minutes apart, conversations I had once experienced separately were now sitting beside each other, and things that had been diluted by time were suddenly concentrated on a screen in front of me. By the end of the day I had had enough.

And then something very strange happened. That evening I received a message. I don’t want to say who sent it or exactly what it said, because that isn’t really the point.

What matters is that the message was trying to convince me of a different version of something connected to what I had just spent the entire day reading, and the timing was almost surreal because I had literally just read what happened. Not what I remembered happening, but what happened.

I had read the conversations, listened to the words, put the dates together and followed myself through those eight months almost in real time, through the things I was writing and saying while I was actually living them. And a few hours later, there it was: another version of reality. It is much harder to question your own reality when you have just spent an entire day reading it.

Maybe on another day it would have affected me differently. Memory is strange and time makes things blurry. We forget details, we question ourselves, we wonder whether something was really as bad as we remember, whether we misunderstood it, whether we exaggerated or whether there was something we didn’t see.

But yesterday there was almost no space for that, because everything I might normally have questioned was still sitting right there in front of me.

How do you convince someone that the film was different when they have just watched it? That was the contradiction of my day: I spent hours feeling physically sick because I had been confronted with too much reality at once, and then, almost immediately afterwards, I was confronted with an attempt to reshape that same reality.

It made me realise something about why I am doing all this work before writing this book. Memory matters, and memory is part of the story, but sometimes there is something incredibly powerful about being able to go back to the words that existed before time had the chance to change them.

The messages, the emails, the voice notes, the things written in the middle of an ordinary day without knowing that months later they would become part of a book. They don’t tell me what I think happened now. They show me what I was seeing, saying, feeling and experiencing then.

And yesterday, for perhaps the first time, I understood the strange kind of protection that can exist in having all of that in front of you.

Because memory matters. But sometimes memory has receipts.