My mom sent me this little notebook that I carried around when I was 14 and 15. I had regular big notebooks I was journaling in, but this was for flashes of inspiration.
It's pretty embarrassing, how seriously I took myself. It's interesting to see how into the natural world I was then, as now. Can't stop myself writing about it.
That, and love poems to my unrequieted first love. Now, I'm pretty sure he was gay, but I'm not sure whether he ever came out. I know he got married after college. I hope he's found a way to be happy, because he was a really good guy.
It was amazing, looking at this after all these years. In some instances, I could remember exactly where I was when I wrote the words. My nicest little insight came while riding the team bus with the players and cheerleaders to a basketball game. I was there as a reporter for the school paper. I had a moment of feeling isolated, looking at my reflection in the dark window, and then noticing one of the best players staring out his own window, probably feeling pretty much the same thing.
When I read him some of the lines, laughing, Hydra said I was being too hard on my younger self. I guess you have to write all the trite out of your system in order to get to the more interesting stuff.
3 comments:
This is kinda funny, since I did a similar thing not too long ago when I was reading my diary to my husband about this guy who was a real jerk to me but I liked him anyway. Of course, the guy in my diary was him. He was pretty embarrassed. But in his defense, he was a dumb kid at the time.
How sweet of your mom to send this. I have every single journal/notebook I've written in since I was twelve and boy oh boy, there are DEFINITELY many asinine, cringe-worthy comments over the years. I'm sure when I pull my journals from today out in twenty years, I'll say the same.
Yeah, I have my notebooks...all but two (one I left on a train in Germany and the other was stolen from a car, in a backpack). But they are a bit more bearable from the past few years, partly because I write fiction and everything in them, not just my sob stories!
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