Dreadful Nonsense

I was rambling through my bedroom drawers last night, moving things from one place to the other because that's what I do when I'm supposed to be asleep. I came across a pile of old diaries, the oldest being one I wrote when I was 12. I was very young when I was 12, and I've read through this diary a number of times since, but I'm always really surprised at the content, because it really is incredibly childish. Not childish in the manner that I'm still incredibly childish, but more child-like, in tone and content. It's odd. And it's difficult to reconcile that person with the person that I am today.

Flicking through that last night, I also found about a month's worth of entries written in 1998 that I have absolutely no memory of writing. I was home for the summer from college and pining after a boy who would eventually become my boyfriend (although the diary doesn't stretch off to that date), having problems with my friends that would finally blow up (albeit three years later) into a stand off screaming row that we would never quite recover from, and generally being a bit lost in life. I remember very vividly all the events detailed in the diary (especially the bits to do with the boy) but I don't remember a single moment when I sat down to write this, and wasn't at all aware of these entries until just now.

The parallels between then and now freaked me out just a tiny bit more than they should have. Swap some of the names and ages and circumstances about - but don't change the bare facts - and any one of those entries could have been written about today. This got me a-wondering and a-thinking, and I fired off a text message to my peeps asking them if they thought that we are condemned to live through the same patterns in life over and over again, making exactly the same mistakes with the same type of people and creating the same situations in which to find ourselves. In short, once you're out in the real world, is your life experience just an endless session of ever decreasing circles?

Mrs D, with her wise head on her wise shoulders, told me really to stop thinking about things so damn much, because I'm just making myself go all twittering for no reason. And she's right. I've definitely been reading too many psychology books lately, and I'm seeing patterns where there are none, and trying to create theories around crazy thinking that will eventually get me locked up. But it is really strange to receive these letters to myself from a past I'd forgotten documenting. It brought back a lot of memories - not many of them very pleasant, unfortunately. I find that I only really write personal diary entries when I'm depressed, so if the old plane does go down in a couple of weeks time, could someone please tell my family to ignore all the crazed journal entries they find as the ramblings of someone who hadn't yet been introduced to Mr and Mrs Valium, and not to worry, because really I was always quite the chirpy sort.

This entry was posted on 15 July 2004 at 1:43 am. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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