![]() ![]() And my journals became a way to do that: to construct myself. It’s odd, it’s often uncomfortable, but it’s true, so I may as well make myself up. Unlike most other people, I’m not tethered to a remembered history. So early in 2017, in addition to watching the world slowly side into a dumpster-fire the size of Jupiter, I also was tired of trying to figure out what was in those missing years, who I would have or should have been, how I turned into who I am. Apparently it resonates with a lot of people because it is all over my FB feed. I don’t have a childhood self to return to–though if you do, that’s great, and I’m happy for you. This image, for instance, does not resonate with me at all. Before then, I have my journals, and things people have told me, and weird snatches, and lots of stuff that doesn’t involve my family, and that’s it. For me, narrative memory starts sometime in middle school. Of my mother, I have one clear memory before the age of 14, and a handful of other extremely unpleasant memories of things that involve her or where she was present–I know she was present–but her presence in that memory has been wiped clear as a white-board. I have a handful of memories of my Dad and my brother. I remember some friends, some teachers, school trips, other kids’ birthday parties, summer camp, the cottages. ![]() This is one of those things that’s very awkward to say, and which I’ve been told is scientifically either implausible or impossible so I don’t mention much, but: I don’t have many memories of my childhood. ![]() I started to make charts, draw sketches, record dreams I’d had, write down quotes from books or poems I’d read. In January 2017, I stopped writing in black and blue ink and brought out the coloured pens. Often it was things that made me sad, or angry: I wrote about those feelings in the hope and expectation that by getting it out I wouldn’t be sad or angry anymore. In my first journal from elementary school, I’d gotten the idea that girls were supposed to write about their crushes in their diaries, so I invented crushes so I could write about them in my diary, but not all of the things I thought I should think or felt I should feel were so entertaining. Or, often, what I thought I should think about it. I’ve been keeping journals since elementary school, and they are, generally, what you would expect from journals: hard-back notebooks filled with lined pages covered in a not always legible scrawl of to do lists, New Year’s Resolutions, goals I had or things I wanted to try, quandaries I was trying to work through, and of course, what was going on in my life and how I felt and what I thought about it. ![]()
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