cleaning out my closet

For the next few installments and perhaps more in the future, I'm going to shamelessly steal from the lovely Sheila and post some of my old writing. Sheila cracks open her old journals on Fridays and generously shares her teenage angst and tales of young adulthood. I find myself captivated and comforted by her honesty and willingness to share such personal accounts.

I used to write feverishly in my journal. And then I'd lose interest. Sometimes I'd get a new journal as a gift or I'd see a pretty one at The Museum Company and it would inspire me to start up again. But again, my interest would wane so now I'm left with a bunch of half-filled Georgia O'Keeffe unlined books and a really uneven, scattered personal history. I did have a rather prolific period right after graduating college. I was working for a publishing company and after the initial excitement wore off, I quickly became disillusioned. To battle boredom and occupy my downtime at work, I'd rehash some of my more mortifying childhood moments (most of them were courtesy of the Sisters of Charity at my Catholic school). It helped me work through some of the embarrassment and it entertained my friends when I finally got over my shyness and let them read my work.

Today I was looking for some paperwork and I found a bunch of old notebooks that have scribblings from this era in them. For every comedic tale and nutty diatribe, I found some really eloquent entries chronicling my see-sawing emotions throughout my twenties. I'd forgotten about some of the problems and issues that seemed SO earth-shattering back then. With others, it was far too easy to recall the pain and torment and I got misty all over again. I came across some correspondence between myself and THE EX. It was all the notes we exchanged after we broke up. Instead of rereading them and torturing myself, I tore them up and tossed them in the garbage. Because I don't always have willpower, I dumped water on the letters to blur the ink so that I couldn't retrieve them later in a moment of weakness. And then -- bear with me because here's where it gets a tad scary -- I spit on them. It wasn't even out of disrespect -- I just knew there would be NO danger of my addiction getting the better of me since I would NEVER touch anything with spit on it (knowingly). I'm so glad my neurotic aversion to gross stuff exceeds my lack of self-discipline.