Journal

When I was in fourth grade I kept a diary as part of a class assignment. Unfortunately, after much thought, I tossed the diary into a dumpster before I moved from Utah to California when I was 17.

I did this because I thought I was too nostalgic, too stuck in the past. Always looking back was causing me to become stagnant in life, or so I thought. I was always comparing my present situation to an idealized past that may or may not have existed. I’m not sure why a 17-year-old me was leaning on an old diary, surely I didn’t think I reached my peak at 10. It’s fuzzy, but I believe my line of thinking was that I couldn’t really every change if I had old things to remind me how I used to be. I wasn’t completely unsatisfied with my self - it was just an awkward time in my life. My head wasn’t in the right place, I guess. Mainly, I think the idea was that leaving my journal behind would lead to me becoming re-born in California.

I’m not sure if was “re-born.” I’ve certainly changed a lot, though. Mainly,  I’m 20x more comfortable in my own skin. I think that would have happened regardless of whether I kept my journal. 

Changed or not, I think my general disposition and take on life are similar. One of the few things I remember from that journal was a response to my fourth grade teacher asking us to write about whether we’d ever been in a fist-fight. I wrote what appeared to be a dramatic story in which I goliath’d the hell out of a bully who was twice the size of me. Not only that, I looked really cool in the process. I capped off the tale by casually mentioning “note: stop lying to self” at the bottom of the page. Ha, seriously - parts of my personality will always be there.