History
This is my life history spread out on my kitchen table:
Seventeen years of personal history.
Seems like it should be a bigger pile — but there were some long silences.
The first journal is the purple one at the bottom, with the lock. Looking at it tonight, I realize that at some point I tore out about half the pages. So while it’s true that I have been keeping a journal since I was in the sixth grade, I actually only have entries dating back to the seventh grade. That makes me a little sad.
The first eight entries are all about a boy — the rise and fall of a relationship in 10 days — at least, that incarnation of the relationship. Those particular entries happen to be about Thomas William, the first boy I kissed, the constant boy in my life from the first day of seventh grade until the day I told him I was getting married. (I haven’t talked to him since. He was, apparently, even angrier with me than I realized that day.) This journal is filled with scintillating writing such as “March 12, 1989. Nothing much happened today. I sat around and moped, watching TV, playing Nintendo, reading, imagining. Imagining a lot about Tommy. I still like him, but I hate him for breaking up with me. It’s not fair. I’ll never talk to him again.” High quality stuff. That journal ends with — shockingly — “I’m falling more and more in love with Tommy every time I see him.” (And, in the end, that continued to be true for many years. I can’t think if a single moment in high school that doesn’t have Thomas William woven through it.)
The journals got better. I got more real with myself. I got more honest. The small book with flowers all over it is among my favorite material things in the world — and there’s not a single “entry” more than two paragraphs long. It’s just a collection of random thoughts, images, and dreams from my last year of high school and my first year of college. The journal with the heart on the front is almost solely letters to an ex-boyfriend, in which I came to terms with some nasty stuff in my past that was affecting my ability to form solid relationships. I don’t ever reread that journal; it is too painful. There’s one book that I kept while I was in recovery from depression, finally getting treatment, and I read through that one whenever I want to be astonished by myself. There’s one that is more an art journal than a personal journal — and I love that one. I love to leaf through it; the riot of color is fun.
I love these books. They are mostly boring as hell; they contain nothing earth shattering, and very little even interesting. They can be humiliating in their superficiality, but every so often they are stunning — at least to me — in their truth. I would not be who I am without this history, captured in just this way.
