new diaries, old diaries
my first diary can be traced back to second grade. i remember writing about the fact that a girl in my class, named berenice, wore a bra to school.
eight years old and the news of the day was that one of my classmates wore a BRA. i also wrote about the fact that she’d brought a cassette tape to school and played it for us while we waited for the bus after class. it was bobby brown’s single "my prerogative” and despite not even owning a walkman at that point (jesus, can i age myself any worse than i already am?) i wanted bobby brown. and his songs. i also wanted a bra like berenice but genetics made sure that wasn’t necessary for at least another nine years. dammit.
i kept diaries in middle school and mostly complained about swim practice and being the slowest damn human in existence. it was rough. i lamented a lot about being stuck in the slow lane with the little kids while my peers were off, lanes away, being amazing with their gold medals and their boobs. i had neither. (starting to see the pattern i’m painting here? i was a very two-dimensional kid…. boys and boobs. my life was about boys and boobs.)
i moved on to a small book with dramatic native american art in high school and wrote about the boys i liked, the boys that didn’t like me, the girls that liked the boys that didn’t like me, the boys that liked the girls that didn’t like me and so on and so forth. it’s a solid three years of angst and terrible decisions and sometimes i read it in my best lumpy space princess voice to my girls and they crack up.
kenny will randomly hit me with a “ohmigawwdddd…walker didn’t even call me this weekend like he said he would. what a loser!” and we’ll fall over laughing at what i thought was sooooo important at the tender age of 15 and three-quarters. the truly hysterical part is that i can place maybe three faces out of the pages of names i wrote about. i’ve literally forgotten most of the cast of characters from that overly dramatic chapter of my life. thank god, right?
little changed over the years. i remember my adult diaries and i just cringe when i wonder where the hell they wound up. for the life of me, i can’t find that big ass red one i kept between the ages of 23 and 27 and holy shit, please lord let it have burned up in a fire somewhere. please and thank you amen. (it’s almost as if i’d looked back at my teenage years of terrible decisions and said something like “here, hold my beer” and threw whatever shit at the bad decision wall i could to see what stuck. look, i’m not proud…but at least i’m honest. and i’m honestly terrified about how truthful i was a couple times in that era…)
i have a wirebound bitty i got at tj maxx that i’ve carried around for the past three years and maybe filled up 15 pages if i’m being generous. 15 pages out of the past three years…it’s sad. i’ve lost some beautiful people in that time, made a lot of memories, bought a house, survived covid…but i couldn’t be bothered to document my thoughts and memories? disappointing.
worse is what i put in those dozen or so pages. i talked a lot of shit about situations, for the life of me, i can’t remember. i talked a lot about the stupid things i ate or wish i ate. some mentions of my kids, but not nearly enough. and shoes. i talked a lot about my choices in footwear for some reason. odd.
to remedy that burning shame i felt for my unproductive, unprodigious use of the tj maxx notebook, i went shopping. (like i always do whenever i’m forced to feel an honest-to-goodness emotion) and bought myself a moleskine hardcover beauty with blank pages of open road.
feeling guilty about those 15 pages of 2018-2021, i ripped them out and gluesticked them to the back so they wouldn’t end up like the big red book of shame (lost to time and eternity) and now those mundane ramblings about what i ate and who i talked shit about will stay with me for the next iteration of journaling. whatever that’s going to look like.
and now here i sit, new journal all shiny and ready for pithy observations and witty recollections and it’s taking all i have not to write about the fact that when i made my amazing lunch this morning, my pita bread was moldy and my lettuce browning.
no pressure, though, you know, to live an interesting life worth writing about, right?