Burn After Reading

What an enlightening evening I've had! All my sewing things are stuck in boxes all over the place while we're finishing off the laundry room, and I was looking for something important. I went through box after box with no luck at all. Then I found the bins where I had stored the things I had when I was younger, including some rather embarrassingly sappy diaries. These weren't the ones I was really interested in. The journal that meant the most to me is one that I liberally censored when I became a wife, burning and shredding much of it. Over the past 22 years I've only rarely regretted that decision, but I do sometimes wish I had kept a better record.

Turns out I did.

There in the box was my journal. And guess what? It was intact. It must have been just photos and letters I destroyed. There were loose pages, though, and I think I might have torn out some pages, rewritten them on identical paper, and just stuck them in. Why, I'm not sure.

Oh. My. Gosh.

There it was, in black and white. Not everything, certainly, because I am a sporadic record-keeper at best, but enough that I was sucked right into those pages. I could see myself writing them, remember how I felt at the time. Desperately in love on one page, heartbroken on another. Giddy with excitement on Thursday, despondent on Saturday.

I was seriously planning on going on a mission at one point. My relationship with my father is enormously complex. I have dated a lot of boys/men. I see clearly why things didn't work out with any but Sweetie. I was a challenging person in every sense of the word. My poor parents didn't know what hit them, I'm sure.

I hated advertising and couldn't wait to leave it. I was desperate to move to Seattle and talked about it a lot. I liked smart, powerful people with money and fast cars for awhile. Then my allegiances changed and I sided with the proletariat. My feelings about religion were conflicted and often ironic. I didn't see my family very often. I wanted to get married and have kids at a much earlier age than I remember. I was banging against the sides of my cage with my bare hands, impatient for my real life to start.

I like this person. I had guts, drive, tenacity, and resourcefulness. I wish I had written more, but I'm enormously grateful I wrote what I did. I remembered myself as being much more fickle and irresponsible, but looking back I would call it being infinitely adaptable. When something didn't work out, I made other plans right away. I'm still very much that way.

Makes me want to go write in my journal now.