stab stab stab stab -

[verbminx]

I have, in the course of packing madness, come across some notebooks from 1992-1994. Fiction, poetry, a handful of class notes, a couple of letters (mostly to the infamous Ex Who Got Married Last Year, and mostly unsent). I didn't keep a journal; I wrote letters to people and didn't send them. I have two shoeboxes of these letters in my closet, but I forgot that there were still versions in my notebooks as well. I also still have my academic planner from my senior year of high school and found that it is full of his misdeeds. When we were breaking up, I wrote them out on the monthly calendar pages, so that I could get a clearer view of the course of our relationship and decide whether or not I thought it was worth saving. (Answer: No, no, no.)

It has become very clear to me via reading these journals that, while I am a lot more mature and have a degree of backbone which my 1993-self would have found unimaginable, I have been repeatedly hitting the same emotional brick wall for, uh, my entire adult life. My mostly-break from dating (and retreat to acting like a precocious teenager) has been... I'm not sure if it's healthy getting-myself-together time, or just a fantastically avoidant relief from the pressures of having to function in a relationship. (I do revel in avoidance, which is really UNhealthy). I haven't even kissed a boy in 3 years. Or a girl, but I'm not really interested in girls that way - if I had kissed a girl it wouldn't mean anything to me and it probably wouldn't even be sexual. (Which is actually why I don't kiss girls anymore - I don't think it's nice to kiss people if you don't really mean it.)

I'll type up some of the fiction at some other point; it's OK in an "I wrote it when I was 17" way. Some of it is very (unintentionally) fanfic-like; I thought I was writing historical fiction, at the time, but it comes out more like fanfic about historical personages. That, I will not type out. That, I will bury in a trunk somewhere and pretend not to have written.

But you do have to be kind to your Self of a decade ago. Even if you know That Is Where It All Went Wrong.

(by the way, "stab stab stab" isn't directed at me or at M. or really at anyone. Maybe at my notebooks. it's mostly just an expression of repetitive frustration. like "Let's go BURN something!" Stress relief.)

Comments

[eac.livejournal.com]

But you do have to be kind to your Self of a decade ago. Even if you know That Is Where It All Went Wrong.

Oh, please be kinder to yourself than that; I think that's where it all goes wrong for almost everyone (or within about 4 years of then).

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

hahaha! yeah, i'd say the ages 13-21 are real winners for just about everyone. ;)

i did make some spectacularly bad choices when I was 17 though. if I could pick a point to go back to and make different decisions, it would be starting in the summer of 1993, extending probably to the summer of 1995.

it is both comforting and alarming to know that physics suggests i'm just living in one of the FRUSTRATING universes, there being an infinite number based on each specific choice. in all probability there is at least one parallel universe where everything runs absolutely perfectly & I did not seriously fuck up my life when I was 17-19. But there's also one where I died when I was two, so I think sticking with the known universe is probably best.

[eac.livejournal.com]

But there's also one where I died when I was two, so I think sticking with the known universe is probably best.

Or becoming a giant omnipotent superpower who can fix ALL of it. :)