I’m sitting in the car with my dad. I’m seven or eight. We pull up to a four-way stop after school, and I know this is when it happened because I remember the light, that 4 o’clock California afternoon glow. I ask my dad, what is a journal for? What is its purpose? Why do people keep them? He tells me that it’s nice to look back on what you were doing that day and remember. Remember what you were feeling. Remember what you were thinking. Remember what was happening.
I kept a LiveJournal in middle school and updated it with emotional rants about boys who would never like me and friends who had wronged me. In my sophomore year of high school, I purchased a bright orange cloth-bound journal on a trip to Seattle, but after a couple of weeks the entries were few and far between. I don’t toy with “what ifs.” I keep romanticization at bay. But I never committed to keeping a diary, and I regret it.
I don’t care what I was having for dinner on this day twenty years ago. I don’t care about a ten-year-old’s juicy gossip or what math assignment was stressing me out. I don’t even care about righting adolescent wrongs. What I do care about: the lonely hours that defined growing up as an only child in the middle of nowhere. The minuscule details that may not have meant anything then, but could mean something now. The friendships I’ve lost and gained, and how they deteriorated and blossomed. Those deep questions concerning religion, self-worth, fate, philosophy, life, death. I care about the headspace I was once in, and how I got here.
Memories are as slippery as water. Some hold fast, some trickle through your fingers, and some evaporate slowly.
It’s comical to realize you suddenly like tomatoes and mustard when you once hated them. It’s a shame to lose your taste for a television show you grew up watching. And it’s downright surreal to wake up and realize you’ve changed. I am not the same person who graduated from the University of San Francisco in 2016, and she was not the same person who decided to go to fashion school six years before that, and she definitely wasn’t the same girl who moved to the city at seventeen, indifferent about college and completely uncertain of what the future held.
I haven’t completely forgotten what it was like to be me five, ten or twenty years ago, but I am curious about the particulars. I spend my days parsing sentences and tinkering with words. I hold them tight before letting them disappear into the world to work their magic. I stare them in the face, look for errors, check for accuracy. I am so used to seeing my professional life in paragraphs that when I look for the chronicle of my personal life and find nothing, it feels as if part of me has vanished.
Who was I on those happy birthdays, those somber winter days, those raucous summer nights?
My skin is still my skin. My eyes are still my eyes. My experiences are still my own, informing each decision whether I am conscious of it or not. But I wish that I’d preserved all of it — my mistakes and triumphs, my tragedies and accomplishments, my ideas and fears — on paper. Joan Didion once wrote, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” I have not yet met the ghost of my former self, but I would like to be prepared if it happens.
Tomorrow I’m starting a journal.