I'm very interested in writing lately. A dear friend of mine is in basic training, and my letters to her have been gushing with all the words I want to get out. I'm interested in my current writings, and my old angst. There are some things I am quite done with looking at, but some things still intrigue me. One of my old blogs (not coincidentally, the one I don't have the URL to), and some of my old journals, I would like to look at again. The rest, I appreciate the presence of.
My old, ratty composition book is one I never re-read. My handwriting at the time was absolutely atrocious, and it covers a span of my life that I don't like to remember the nitty-gritty of. I like to hold it in my hands and remember, but I don't like to decipher my hyrogliphics only to find silly angst over one boy or another, or blow-by-blow justifications for relationships that I now am more than happy to accurately label as toxic.
An excerpt, from journal C.
"My love for photography has lately been stifled by T constantly telling me that R is better than me. Ok, so I care. But I don't want him talking about it all the time. It's like he just wants to prove himself right, and how I feel just doesn't matter. I feel like I don't matter personally to anyone. I wonder if princess Diana felt this way. ... I feel this connection with her, like her life and mine are somehow intermixed. Call me crazy..."
I will, thanks. For starters, I know for a fact that my friends were not hounding me with harsh words about how other people were better than me. The reality is that I was so deeply jealous of R, because she has immense talent, and that pricked me right in the insecurity. My reaction, as you might expect from a 13 year old girl, was to talk at great length about how much she sucked. T just dared to stand up for someone I was unjustly criticizing.
I was extremely shocked by my "connection to princess diana". I knew, and know, next to nothing about princess Diana. I think she was talked about in the Princess Diaries series and that's what convinced me that I liked her. What fascinates me about this is that I didn't have even a month where I was genuinely interested in Princess Di. This deep observation of mine probably stuck around for a couple of days.
The next page includes a shamefully bad logical argument for the existence of God. I don't know who I was trying to prove myself to, but I used the word "thus" every couple of sentences, to make giant logical leaps. I was also surprised to note that I wrote this a couple of months before I actually became a Christian. And at the time of writing it, I thought that I was one. Which is frankly a frightening notion. Most of my life I just parroted back what I had been told and walked the way I thought i was supposed to, without any actual life/heart change or any actual faith. I certainly felt the presence of God, and I believed God existed, but I didn't get it at the time. It's a small disadvantage of growing up in the church, I suppose.
It's so strange and beautiful to me, to sit in the same corner where I wrote in this very book 7 over years ago. Honestly, I can't believe that I was 13 7 years ago. Seven years. That's an awfully long time. I wonder who I thought I would be at almost-20 when I was 13. I have a few guesses.
Strangely, I would definitely have said married. To my boyfriend at the time, of course. All I've ever really wanted was a domestic life, and I wanted to hop on that train as soon as possible. Getting married at 18, I probably would have expected to be pregnant by now. Certainly moved out with my husband. I would have expected to get my license right on my 16th birthday, to have a fabulous sweet 16 party. I would still be tight with my best friends.
None of those things happened, obviously. I'm kind of horrified by my lack of foresight. Even at the age of 16, even at the age of 18, I wanted to get married ASAP. At 15 or so I was obsessed with wanting a baby. At fifteen I couldn't take care of myself, and I shudder to think of having a five year old right now. I didn't get my license until I was almost 19, I didn't have enough friends to really have a birthday party when I was 16, and as for friendships, that's its own rats nest. Suffice it to say that things are not how I would have anticipated or hoped, and I couldn't be happier about that.
As for marriage, I still want it, and soon, but I have a much more practical view of it all now. I will probably be married five years from now, which all at once sounds terrifying and wonderful. There are nights where I wish I was already there, and there are times when I want to cling to this stage of my life. I feel like i've experienced enough of real life and relationships that I know both what I want and that I don't want it quite yet.
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