The lost years

I'm missing one of my journals.

This is a little horrifying.

I've been trying to kid myself that I'd only misplaced it. But as I was on my hands and knees, reaching under the bed in a last ditch effort to convince myself that I was hiding it in my guitar case, reality finally came crashing down. Somewhere during the course of my last move, the written record of three years of my life has been lost to circumstance.

I probably wouldn't have even noticed had I not decided to take a trip down memory lane. Over the last week or so, I've been reading through all of my journals piecemeal, bits here and there throughout the years. After spending several nights revisiting countless unfortunate crushes, over dramatized school worries, and lots of transcribed song lyrics, I was more than a little over myself. But more than anything, I hadn't been able to glean the perspective that I'd hoped from analyzing my past self. I'm looking into those corrective lenses for hindsight that I keep hearing so much about. For every meaningful turn of phrase or happy memory that would have otherwise been forgotten, there was a noticeable cringing. Is it really such a good idea to keep these things? Not only saving the old ones but persisting in scrawling out book after book, year after year?

My motivations in keeping a journal have shifted over time. When I first felt the urge to have a diary, I was about 12. My parents' divorce was getting uglier by the minute, and what better way was there to immortalize your court-appointed therapy? I existed under the delusion that someone, someday might uncover it, like a lost Hemingway manuscript, and publish it. Considering that at that time I was chiefly concerned with Star Trek and collecting those furry animal stickers, it's probably for the best that my early work avoided commercial distribution. After high school, there was more of a focus on pure documentation - I recounted conversations verbatim, described events neutrally. Then I was writing out of habit, feeling that it was more an obligation than anything else. Aw, shit, I might as well write something since The X-Files is a repeat.

Then something changed. In the last few years, my journals got uglier, less structured. I found that the only time I felt the urge to write anything was when it was weak or self-hating or a fist shaken at the sky at the unfairness of things. It became an fetid swamp for me to unload all of the things that I worried would taint my real life with The Crazy. Rather than meticulously documenting events, it was a litany of heartbreak, neediness and open letters to people I despised for what I deemed casual cruelty. I go back and read things that concern me sometimes, pieces of thoughts that I know I've had before and swore that I wouldn't have again. On the other hand, it could be that personal progress isn't so much not having the thoughts as not indulging them by sobbing on the phone in a hotel room to someone who really didn't need to talk to you about this at 1:00AM on a Tuesday. Progress is keeping your crazy off the street.

If you tell a lie long enough, everyone around you will believe it. Contrary what people say, you yourself never do. It just gets less and less hard to tell. In making the effort to keep my less attractive impulses contained in blank books provided by Barnes & Noble, it's almost as though I've managed to spread a whitewash over all my scars. I know they're there, although I might kid myself otherwise. As a result, I've come to realize that I seem simple and well-adjusted. Overconfident, suggested someone who I thought knew me pretty well. I find it both funny and frustrating, I guess. Having been the unhappy misfit for so much of my life, it's strange to realize no one believes you can appreciate their damage.

And that's the thing. Damage is compelling and charismatic. For a long time, I always wore my dysfunction on my sleeve; I was unapologetic of its manifestations. What better way to make sure that everyone likes you because you're a hot mess with too much baggage? Fuck them if they can't deal with it! I'm a twitching bundle of emotional tics! It's the curse of the self-awareness. But after too many emails that should have never been sent, too many people alienated, too much time offered up to the seductive cult of self-pity, I was simply unwilling to work that hard. Being in love with your own pain gets tiresome. Get cable. Read a book. Mock others - most of them deserve it. By all means, be fucked up but temper it with a larger perspective. To borrow a phrase*, "Life is short, and then you die with a bad CD collection."

I'm trying not to mourn my missing journal too much. Those years are gone from the collection, so there's no opportunity to revisit the mistakes, poor word choices and probably not as many lessons as I might hope. Although, to be honest, this week I've been looking back on my past self with more generosity than I'll allow my current incarnation. Isn't that always the way?

Maybe the value is less in the actual record and more in the writing. And so it goes.

* Thanks, Mark