China and Platinum Will Both Be Accepted

On December 25, 1990, I received my first journal. I was a newly minted 10 year old and had never even considered keeping a diary. But my cousin BEN, a writer, gave me this gift and I have utilized it ever since. This month marks my 20th year.

Many people seem impressed when I tell them about the length of my autobiographical chronicling; my husband has said that he thinks I would be a natural writer given how long I’ve kept a journal. I, myself, am neither impressed nor convinced of any talent.

My first thought, when I consider how long I’ve done this is “wow, that is a long time.” My second thought is “fuck that is a ton of weight to cart around.” I’m not speaking metaphorically; some years ago I had a foot locker in which I kept all of my diaries and notebooks and that mother fucker weighed a ton. It was only recently that I had to get rid of the trunk as it has fallen into disrepair, and my journals were retired first to boxes and then to a shelf in my bedroom closet.

20 years is, obviously, a long time and my journal began with a bang. Begun in December of 1990, it records my father’s death on February 19, 1991 and many deaths thereafter. It contains my innocent self in its purest form and records my childish naivety. If you look at my entries around the time of my father’s death you’ll find that February 19 was the worst day of my life; a week later, I write about going to Old Historic New Castle with relatives and it is like there had been no tragedy at all.

I am sure there are the tons of entries regarding the usual adolescent misgivings and anxieties, and I know damned well that there are embarrassing chapters from my teen years, but I do not go back and read these very often. Sure, I occasionally grow nostalgic to see what I was like in the 7th grade or what I was writing when first given a diary; who wouldn’t be? But it was only in recent years that I had the courage to look at the high school diaries given how apathetic and melodramatic I was. Seriously, everything was SO important and SO meaningful to me during that time of my life and it took a long time for me to be able to even casually open the cover of one of my journals from that period.

At this point in my life, it is the college years I can’t face. It isn’t that I was still a ne’er do well or a self-important teenager; it’s that I most likely had the onset of my bi-polar disorder at 17 and did not have treatment until 23. If you haven’t experienced this delightful disorder, you won’t know what I’m talking about. Suffice it to say that a number of years in my life featured me being totally out of control and in need of help. I’ve been fortunate, mind you, as I have never suffered from any form of psychosis. But my life would have been greatly benefited by an earlier diagnosis and earlier prescriptions.

I am embarrassed of many of the events that occurred during my college years but, more troublingly, I am afraid of who I was. I recently opened a journal that I’d kept whilst still in college and I was shocked by the vitriolic hate that I’d been directed toward myself. I’ve always known that I suffered a great deal of self-esteem issues during my time but somehow I’d managed to forget the hate I previously felt for myself. At one point in my life, I thought about suicide every thirty seconds. The first time I saw my psychiatrist at the university I told her “I think about killing myself as frequently as people think about sex; I know, I’ve timed it.” I wrote so many suicide notes during that period because I needed to perfect the final version so that my family and friends would understand implicitly that they were not to blame. Oddly enough, I think it as my failure to come up with the perfect letter that allowed me to survive and see the day I would finally seek help.

Not that I didn’t grow impatient. One night I took a bunch of pills, washed down with vodka. I ended up getting sick, throwing up, passing out, and then going to my morning class as if nothing had happened. It wasn’t my first attempt but it shared certain similarities; my attempts were not cries for help. I either wanted to die or, should I survive, I wanted no one to know about the attempt.

These days I reckon my journal is boring and whiney. That is totally fine by me. I have had enough death and enough madness to satisfy any bored part of my being. Sometimes I think that the reason I’m so OK and well-adjusted to the idea of aging is because I am so afraid of the past. I had some scary years and I hate being reminded of them. I’ve never been in a rush to grow up and I’ve never been too upset at the idea of aging (well, with the exception of turning 25, which, oddly, was very hard). I wonder if I don’t look towards my 30’s with great anticipation if only because they signify the end of my tumultuous 20’s.

If nothing else, December 8th will begin a new decade for me to document in old-fashioned, heavy as fuck notebooks.