Being nearly ready to embark on my first real vacation in almost two years, I have noticed myself thinking towards the past. In the time since my last adventure, I have started this blog, been through three very different jobs, moved twice, lost a friend, and more than likely have changed more than I know I have. There’s something really uncomfortable about being 24. I had hoped once I passed 21 all of the steaming awkwardness in life would have ended and things would start to make more sense. But they don’t. It’s worse. But people just don’t talk about it as much.
I found a journal last week that I had started when I was 17 years old. The first dated entry was on March 16, 2006, just about seven years ago. The handwriting is all too familiar, maybe a bit more loopy and teenage in style than it currently is now, but is a pleasant and heart warming sight, to recognize bits of oneself from a time when things were so different.
“Not panic, not frustration, not contempt, not happiness, not bliss, not satisfaction, no, definitely not satisfaction. It’s really not much of anything. I don’t know what to do, how to think, then again I never really do. I am an artist, need I over analyse this as well? I can’t paint a ‘pretty’ picture of this as I see it. Slightly less amazed as you can clearly see, let down perhaps, careless, that’s what it is. Careless. I said it was alright. Should I have? A little late now though, I know it’s not right, it can’t be.”
Other than the overuse of the comma it it not much different than something the me of today would come up with. Is there hope that I have not changed so much after all?
That was an important day in the making of the story of my life. Though so insignificant now, it was a dire crisis at the time. I wonder, will all of my crisis turn into the same hazy and faded memories, brought back to me in a chance thumb-through of an old random journal?
I press on, page after page, revealing temporally spaced entry’s, moments frozen and lost in the context of their time. April 2006, December 2009, August 2010, October 2010. Each it’s own little story of what I thought I was, in inconstant black scrawling letters. It fascinated me, this written record of my lowest points.
I did what felt right. I added a new entry. February 27, 2013, another entry to forget about and discover at another time, as a different Hailey. A message for my future self, a gift of reflection. A promise of hope.
I put the little black book back on the shelf to once again collect a healthy coating of dust. And on some other unsuspecting day I will pick it up, and no doubt read all my entries then have the courage to add another.
-Miss Hailey Jane
Coffee and Turtlenecks 