Let it go, kid.
Sunday night was a big night. I got home from Mom’s before it even fell dark, and it seemed I could do more than my usual weekly ritual of cleaning the apartment. There are still unpacked things in my bedroom and office, things that can be more neatly sorted and organized. I spied that one particular box in my bedroom and knew: it was time. I bustled for a sharp knife and sawed through the packing tape. A single word was printed on the box: “WRITIN’.”
Inside that box, I knew, were all my childhood journals. I’ve been keeping a journal in one way or another since I was 11 years old. There are a few gaps, but never for too long. What I imagined happening when I finally opened that box was taking the first steps on a long journey, a journey back to The Girl I Was, a chance to search for clues to the Woman I Have Become. I may as well have gotten a hanky and a glass of wine when I got that sharp knife, may as well have baldly stated my intentions to get wrapped in a ball of nostalgia so immense, so dense, that it would qualify as its own roadside attraction.
Turns out that didn’t happen. Oh, there were discoveries that made me pause. Sheaves of beginnings-of-stories that I’d forgotten. Poems (seriously?) written for boys I no longer remembered. The lovingly hand-written lyrics to a song by my high school boyfriend’s punk band. (I cannot be 100% sure but that slip of paper may have once hung in my locker.) By the time I excavated my way down to the actual journals, past all the loose sheets of ephemera, I felt numb, and not just because my leg had fallen asleep. There was so much! Plenty to smile and laugh at, but also a reminder of the way writing used to be for me, more vital and more urgent than it usually seems now.
In the journals themselves, though, was another side. It was easy for me to idealize the energy of youth, to look wistfully at the work I could do before I had Bills and Responsibilities and Worries and wonder if I could ever do “pure” work like that again. The first thing I saw when I cracked one of those speckled composition books, though, was red ink. What I had managed to forget was that throughout my adolescence, I would read what I had written before in my journal – months, even mere weeks before – and make derisive, self-mocking notes in the margins in colored pen. The me of October 1986, for instance, could not BELIEVE the stupidity of the me of July of 1986. And let’s not even discuss poor little me of December 1983. The older the journal entry, the more buried it was beneath jokes, editorial comments, and insults born of embarrassment. What a strange pattern! I would open up, to no one but myself mind you, and then later I would feel so uncomfortable having opened up that I would have to put myself on the record as disagreeing with my younger self.
What? Woman I Have Become was, frankly, appalled. I’d forgotten how hard on herself Girl I Was had been. Just when I should have been letting myself work with the unfettered enthusiasm inhabiting my fiction, I was slamming the door on my own ideas, on the story of my own life.
Say what you will about this blog, but I’m putting these ideas up here, for me and for others, with no self-derision whatsoever. Funny or serious or sad or ridiculous, there’s value in these observations, not despite but because of who I am as I write them.
January 26, 2010
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Jen · 
3 Comments
Tags: self, writing, youth · Posted in: Uncategorized
3 Responses
I never went the route of “grading” my own diaries, but I was so embarassed by them that I still haven’t reread much of what I wrote at 13 or so. I think most of it involved a chaste but very passionate crush on a teacher…
I think all adolescents are their own worst critics, and they think everyone else is as obsessed with them as they are!
Alex, my whole damn journal – for the first few years at least – was crushes. All of it. What struck me wasn’t just my embarrassment but my self-editing. As if the point was ever for anyone else to read these entries! Heh.
I’m totally with you on adolescents thinking everyone is as fascinated with them as they are with themselves. I have some reservations about the worst-critic thing. Certain adolescents, surely. But that’s probably the point – blanket generalizations just aren’t a good idea.
Ouch. As someone whose Woman She Is Today has a pretty troubled relationship with the Girl She Was, I can relate.
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