why I don't read my old diaries anymore
I attempted during the past week or so to copy down my childhood journal entries into one document. I thought it was a good idea. The intention was to reconnect with my younger voice and psyche, since I am writing dialogue with a character who is as young as I was and I am teaching students who are about that age and have been trying to better understand where they are coming from.
And at the beginning, it was working. I was amused by my childhood vernacular and noticed interesting patterns within the topics I decided to note down. My younger self was silly, imaginative, emotional, and loved so deeply. And I am very fond of her.
But I also grieved for her. It started to become very obvious that she was aware of things ‘being wrong’ and yet no one else besides her seemed to acknowledge or have a desire to do anything about it. She vented her frustrations about problems with her friends and social situations consistently. She gave accounts of her trying to fix things through aggressive communication. She seemed feverishly delighted when there were ‘good times.’ And yet all the issues were cyclical. They kept coming back. Nothing really improved. And she got worse. Her notes became more frantic. She kept noting how stressed and tired she was. Academia seemed to be eating her alive and she didn’t have much respite in the social side of things. Nothing was peaceful, quiet, calm. Or if it happened to be, it was swiftly undermined and stolen away.
I had worked through my two youngest diaries and had started on my third, which began with accounts from my sophomore year of high school, when I decided to stop, delete my entire progress, and put all the journals away again.
It was so upsetting, reading it all back, and I realized I was not prepared to deal with reopening those wounds. Picking at them had been helpful in the past, reminding me of old lessons learned, why I felt the way I did about things. But at this point in my life, when I’ve experienced so much growth and gained so much understanding that I hardly recognize the voice in these entries as my own, I don’t need to be reminded of that pain and those frustrations. They hardly matter. Sure, they definitely shaped me, but I’ve been growing beyond them for quite some time now.
And so I gave up.
It's too nice to be at peace.
~nan