I am very glad that I've been keeping a journal since I was 11. (Which has, for the past 2 years, been mostly in the form of this here blog. ;) Someday I should print it in case technology dies. You never know.)
My first journals were spiral notebooks, and I wrote to an imaginary person named Kara. Don't laugh, I got the idea from Anne Frank, who referred to her diary as Kitty. Maybe it's a childish idea, but you have to start somewhere. I guess I needed to invent Kara to be my audience, in order for my thoughts to have direction.
I read the spiral notebooks a few months ago and quite honestly, while I'm glad I have them, I found them to be very silly, petty, and rather embarrassing. As in I'm embarrassed to think that I ever actually was that way. Of course we all do silly things in our youth. ;) But anyhow, I was extremely boy-crazy when I was a kid. Every page is along the lines of "I LOVE him" and "I hope he likes me" and "I hate [whatever other girl my object of affection might be liking]" and "I hope he kisses me!" and so on. I guess love and hate are such simple concepts when you're 11, 12, 13. I always either LOVED him or HATED him. ("Him" being any number of people that I had crushes on as time went by.) As soon as somebody showed childish interest in me, I "loved" him. As soon as we "broke up", I "hated" him. And of course, the next thing for me to do was find somebody new to decide I was "in love" with. That's how middle school is I guess, but it was an eye-opener to read it from my own pen.
I guess what disturbed me the most from reading the spiral notebooks was that there wasn't any closure from them. I went from age 11 to age 13 and just didn't mature a bit. It was pathetic. I was glad to put them away and forget about them again. What I like about the blog is that as I go back and read I can see how I have changed over time... but that evolution just wasn't in my childhood journals.
There's one more diary, though, that I neglected when I was reading the old ones before. It's the one with the lock, which I think I got not too long after I started the first notebook, but I didn't like to write in it much because it is so small and cramped. Today I was cleaning my nightstand and came across it, so I opened it up. It's pretty sporadic at first, because I wrote just a few times and then switched back to the more spacious notebook. Starts with me at 12 being as shallow and silly as before. But it moves on... I guess I must have picked it up again at some point, got tired of the notebooks or something. It really starts up in the middle of my relationship with Jason, in 9-10th grade, at least, that's when I started writing "regularly" (at least a few times a month), and goes up until I left for college.
This diary is the one I think I was hoping to read the night I pulled out those notebooks. In this one I chronicled the gradual end of my relationship with Jason, our break-up, and how I dealt with it. Dealing with my friends growing up, feeling alone, not being sure how to handle it. Easing back into the [yes, high school] dating scene, but with wider eyes, with less fuss, more hope, more determination to take things slower. Finding myself surrounded by friends again. And then the beginning of my relationship with Ryan, and up to just before we left for school. This is the one where I grew up.
It was so neat to see the changes in my writing as time went by. It started with me writing to the imaginary Kara but by the end I didn't need her anymore. At first it was all "I love him soooo much" and by the end... okay, by the end it was also "I love him so much" but in the middle, questioning the meaning of love and the overuse of the word and whether I was ready to say it and hear it yet, that is the difference. In the beginning it went from "I love him" to "he broke up with me and now I hate him", but later it was "I love him but I don't think he's treating me right, I don't know if he loves me, maybe I should break up with him". It's hard to really describe what I saw as I was reading, but it was cool. It was very, very cool.
The other thing that struck me, as I got to the end of what I'd written, was the beauty of my early relationship with Ryan. To read in my own words, things that happened, things he said and did, and just how I felt about him, that was moving, in a certain sense. I got rid of all his notes and emails to me a long time ago -- I couldn't remember, through HIS words, the way things were when it was good. But through mine, I could. And it was good, for that first year or so. College changed everything, but senior year in high school was a great year. I think it helped me, to be able to remember that.
I only have sporadic accounts of things during college, from freshman year up until the beginning of this here blog. (I'm thinking of changing the blog's name to "This Here Blog", what do you think? ;)) I'm glad I'm writing regularly again though. I wish I could keep up with a pen and paper journal, but for now I think this is working just fine. I just hope I never stop writing things down. I'm thankful my 11-year-old self was smart enough to decide one evening that a journal might be a cool thing to have someday. Even if I don't agree with her philosophies on life (namely, boys) I will be eternally grateful that I can watch her grow up, through her words, any time that I want.