9/5/22 3:00 a.m.
I miss you and I miss him
And I miss myself a month ago
Summer 2022 was easily one of the best times of my life: weeks spent in the sun and the outdoors, with friends, and a great sense of purpose working for the first time at my childhood summer camp. I returned home to Virginia and then to Charlottesville with a feeling of contentment and safety, as if I was lying on the beach with the sun warming my skin, but with the knowledge that I somehow wouldn’t burn. Then, the first few weeks of the Fall semester began, and it felt as if a riptide of uncertainty was pulling me out and away from the shore of that summer.
9/7/22 8:37 p.m.
I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I didn’t know so I just said no
Back at school, my emotions and thoughts were constantly shifting, contracting and expanding to fill my empty room. Nothing was still. At points, I felt the world around me was muted, as if I would never be able to recapture the way that summer and those people made me feel. At other points I felt so viscerally unhappy that I imagined my sadness as waves crashing over my head in the ocean and leaving salt to dry down my cheeks. And a great deal of the time I carried on feeling simply fine but as if a piece of me was missing. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, or why I felt so detached from the college version of myself, turning down invitations to wallow in my room. I wanted something, some way to make certain my uncertainties.
10/5/22 11:13 p.m.
Maybe I thought too much
and it looped back around to too little
Maybe if I’d thought the right amount
I’d feel better.
On September 5th 2022, my thoughts were overwhelming me and I felt compelled to write. I took out a blank piece of lined paper, a pencil, and I wrote about how I felt until the page was full. I didn’t always write in complete sentences, blurring the line between poetry and prose. I thought what I had written was beautiful and I thought it was enough. I also thought it was quite possibly the worst thing I had ever written and that I wasn’t enough. I dated it and marked the time, then tucked the paper away in a drawer.
Over the course of that semester, anytime I felt similarly overwhelmed, I rowed through the sea of my emotions, an ink pen as my oar and a piece of paper as my vessel. I put my thoughts in jail between the bars of my lined paper and then bailed myself out by hiding them safely out of sight so I could continue my day.
I always knew I was overthinking things, but yet it felt like every decision I made was still the wrong one. I spent hours agonizing over my choices, even long past I’d made them. I thought for sure that there had to be some magical Goldilocks amount of thinking, enough to make the right choice but not too much to talk myself back out of it. I thought writing everything down could be the solution.
10/16/22 11:25 p.m.
I’ll live I’ll learn I’ll strive I’ll manage I’ll go
and sometimes I’ll feel like crying
feel stupid feel like giving up worthless hopeless fearless
fearful feel full try to be forgiving try to
keep on living keep loving keep driving
Tell the people I love I love them
Make something of myself this decade
This entry is from the night before I turned twenty and left my teenagehood behind. I had spent the first half of that year insisting that nineteen was the first time I had felt my age since I was twelve. I spent the rest of it unmoored, drifting with an insecurity I’d never felt before. Here, I tried to manifest an anchor, putting solid words and wishes down into the sea with which to steady myself.
With another year under my belt, I’ve finally been able to reread these entries as if through a fresh pair of goggles. I feel pride looking at the art I created, the unintentional metaphors that crossed over from entry to entry. I feel embarrassed at the melodrama of it all, of the intensity of my rant about my gums bleeding after I flossed or intentionally crying onto the paper so future me could remember the severity of my emotions. I cringe at the lines so absurdly cheesy I’m certain I couldn’t have believed myself as I wrote them. I feel mortified at the thought of sharing some of what I’ve written with anyone, much less the people I wrote about. I still feel sore when I read these entries, aching inside when I think about the heartbreak of losing that summer.
Mostly, rereading my year-old journal entries, a month or so away from turning twenty-one has reminded me of why I started writing them in the first place. Of the intensity of my need for an outlet where I could make bold declarations while barely treading water. Of wanting to leave something behind to remember myself by.
I’m wondering now why I’ve more or less stopped this practice.
10/17/2023
you aren’t here yet
but nevertheless I still know you
If you’re me, looking back at this days, weeks, or even years from now: you have a message. You still stay up too late procrastinating on your work. You still agonize over some of the most minute choices. You still say the wrong thing and trip over yourself trying to correct it. You’re still a lot sometimes, and you still feel like not enough—still.
But you’ve grown and you’ll continue to grow. You talk through your problems with people more. You try to be patient, to give others the benefit of the doubt. You remember that each of us is swimming, or sailing, or sinking in our own seas. And you can see your growth in your journal, like you can see the fresh green growth on the tips of tree branches in the forest. You can take time to be still, to sit and write, and reflect. You look back, see where you have been. You know now how to chart your course; your letters and words are the constellations with which to guide yourself.
So here’s to angsty journaling alone in your room, and here’s to living and feeling and being for another year.
