Hi!

What have you been up to with the weekend?

I’ve been flipping through old journals that I found while cleaning out my closet. Specifically, I’ve been reading the entries from this day, years ago, all the way back to when I was seven. It always makes me laugh or cry to read the archives of my own life. I don’t know if it will make you do the same or if diary entries are boring to anyone who didn’t write them, but I’m always curious to know what others write in theirs. If you are too, this is for you.

From age fourteen to now, here is, word for word, what I was thinking in July.

JULY 2017

“I’m turning fifteen on Wednesday. Normally, I can’t wait to turn another year older, I am finding that this year I actually feel sad about it. Fourteen is such a solid, good age. It’s not too young, not too old. I’m comfortable here. The thought of getting older is scary because I feel like I’m not making the most of my golden years. I don’t really care about being popular or dating a lot of guys and I’m trying to just live my own life, but it’s hard when everyone around you is obsessed with things that don’t matter. Sincerely, your distraught, teenage self.”

Okay, the fact that I actually called fourteen a solid, good age and then went on to very seriously explain that I was in my golden years, is just too good. I cannot, in hindsight, recollect a more abysmally abhorrent time of my life. But there is some sweetness there too. These lines serve as a record of some of the first moments that I ever had of coming to terms with growing up. I was still a child, but barely, and I knew that. I knew what was slipping away but nothing of what was to come. It was such a liminal space to exist within. I remember the terror and excitement of that very well. This was, looking back, one of the last entries of my childhood that would exist. Meaning, one of the last purely innocent things that I ever wrote. All that came after was written in an another tone. It was a shift I seemed to be aware of right before it occurred.

JULY 2019

“Summer is for losing your mind. I went to a heavy metal concert last night because the drummer invited me and I thought it would be fun. It was not fun. I wasn’t expecting him to marry me but a conversation would have been accepted. Instead I got a side hug, a thanks for coming, and ten broken toes from the mosh pit. If I never smell marijuana again I think I would be alright with that. Don’t date the drummer.”

This made me laugh. Sometimes I forget how angsty I was. I also almost forget that this horrid summer even happened. I was at the end of sixteen, as is evident with the very edgy usage of profanity, and I had not yet learned the things that I know now. Which is to say, when the cute drummer from your class asks if you like heavy metal, do not say yes. And definitely don’t tell him that it’s actually a secret passion of yours. I don’t think I could have picked a more unbelievable genre to feign interest in and even though I was confident that I pulled it off at the time, I am realizing now that he must have also known this. I’m mortified. He was an asshole, but I was naive. He stood me up not long after that concert, I stared at the ceiling of my car for a an hour, and then I never did anything like that ever again. So it lives in my journal as proof of the last summer that I ever tried to be anything other than myself. It was also, incidentally, the summer of edgy music that I still cannot listen to without smelling the distinctive funk of a Southern California mosh pit in July.

JULY 2020

“There are these moments that happen in the weeks that follow heartbreak, small moments when the world is beautiful again, little windows that let the light in. At first, the world seems alarmingly indifferent to your pain. Your life has just collapsed and people are still out walking their dogs. Something about that feels cruel. But then, one day, you’re walking through the park and you hear the saxophone and you smile at a baby and you remember how much you love the saxophone and how much you love smiling at babies and the world does not feel so indifferent to you anymore. And so you kind of tear up and smile a bit because the feeling is so light yet so heavy. Like that smile beat the odds. Maybe these small moments all add up to something and eventually become less of little miracles and more of daily life and that’s how you know that you have healed. Or maybe moments like that will always feel miraculous.

I have a new theory. I think that the only way that we survive change is by continuing to change. In the beginning, everything hurts so much because you have not yet had time to grow. In that moment, you are as close to those moments and to the person that you were inside of them as you ever will be again. In that moment, you are staggering somewhere between who you were and who you are in the painful process of becoming. I think that that is one the trickiest labyrinths that we ever navigate. They say that time heals. I think what they mean is that you need enough time to become someone else. You need enough time to grow so much that when you look back on those memories, you find that even if you wanted to crawl back inside of them, you couldn’t. You couldn’t because you wouldn’t belong there anymore. You realize that you are more than what has happened to you, that you are not what has happened, but how you have overcome it.

I was walking today when I saw a place that we used to go. And I smiled because it barely hurt anymore. I knew that I didn’t belong there anymore, inside of that memory. I am no longer who I was on that day, with you. And that might be the best thing that has ever occurred to me.”

I was obviously going through quite the watershed of a summer that year and I think that these words mostly speak for themselves on that front. I didn’t feel it at the time, at the time it felt like death itself, but I can see now that there was a lot of grace woven into that summer. I grew up. This essay and this essay were both inspired by it.

JULY 2021

“I find the most beauty in seeing humans be humans all by themselves. Perhaps because they look the most like me. I don’t relate to the couples or the sprawling groups of friends as much as I relate to the girl standing knee-deep in the ocean with chaos crashing all around her. Or the large man with the little glasses sitting like Buddha on the shoreline, along the edge of our continent. In passing these people I feel that we are connected in some kind of way, a secret alliance of solitude and silence amidst a screaming world. They seem to display a kind of peace and awareness that I can understand, for it only ever falls over me when I am alone with the world. I hope that when I am that person, the one walking alone on the beach or gallivanting around downtown or reading in a cafe, that I make others feel less alone too.

It is hard to explain how the world feels, yet I am quite certain that it will never feel this way again. Like time has been suspended and you are not sure if you are real. When there is a global pandemic and your campus has been closed down, you can start to feel like you are living a life that no one knows about. And sometimes that’s the best feeling in the world, but a lot of the time it just feels strange. Like the quietest and loudest sound that you have ever heard.”

I think that this one conveys a lot of what it felt like the go through the world while it was still largely closed from the pandemic. There’s a loneliness, but there’s also an appreciation for life and for the small moments of unspoken connection guy that bound us all together during that time. I remember that that year, more than any other, felt important to write about because I knew that I was living through history. I knew that the world would, in fact, never be quite like how it was in those moments ever again.

JULY 2022

“My last few days as a teenager. Iconic. End of an era. A sad celebration. I am thinking of everything that these years have meant to me, of how they have changed me. A decade unlike any other that we have on this earth. I don’t think that there is another period of time that is filled with as much radical change and growth and loss and echoes of love as adolescence. But maybe that’s all of life. Maybe it’s only a lie that we tell ourselves that the chaos will ever cease. But would we want it to? I don’t ever want to grow so stagnant and comfortable that I stop growing. I think that we perhaps just get better at it. We come to know things that we did not know before. We practice. And existence is my favorite practice. I am learning how to be my favorite project, my most sacred palimpsest.

I have really loved nineteen. It has been one of the most valuable years that I have ever held in my hands. I moved out. I got a job. I got to start college in-person. I flew across the country by myself and had a two week love affair with New York. I sat on a fire escape in Brooklyn and watched a dinner party unfold below me. I drank coffee and wandered through the MoMA. I wore orange jumpsuits and flowing dresses and bought the reddest radishes I have ever seen from a farmer’s market in Manhattan. It has all been so beautiful.

So thank you nineteen. Thank you for books and red wine and candlesticks. For independence, love, and funky fashion. As excited as I am to meet people and build a life with them, I am excited today to simply love the world on my own. I am sitting here on the verge of twenty with nothing but gratitude and respect for the place that I have arrived in after years of what felt like wandering through the dark. This past year has delivered me here. And it is the most beautiful. To love your dreams, to have dreams, to know what you want and who you are, to feel your heart beating under your palm and know that there is life in you. I’m in awe of that.”

I love this one because it marks the end of my adolescence, and does so in a tone that conveys that ending. Meaning, I sound lighter. Happier. Excited about the world in all of the ways that I wasn’t allowed to be at eighteen like everyone else. It was the first year where the world felt normal again. And so, it was the first real year of my adult life. The one that I used to finally crawl out of the liminal space that I seemed to be painfully aware of my entrance into back at fourteen. Full circle.

July 2023

As for now? I’m sitting outside listening to jazz music, not heavy metal, and brewing coffee. I’m getting ready to rendezvous with New York. I’m going on long walks and listening to podcasts and reading André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name under the sun. I’m spilling drinks down my wrists at the coffeeshop because someone was reading Vonnegut and I had to quickly halt to speak to said person. I’m dancing bare foot in the kitchen, laughing.

I hope you are too.

Happy Sunday.

Love, m.

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