This newsletter is the first in a series of three essays about my freshman-year journal. Keep an eye out for the second essay in your inbox tomorrow, and the third essay on Sunday.
Thursday November 16, 2006, 1:05pm, Math class
“Not only am I in band, but I’m also funny, creative, and willing to try everything!”
-14-year-old me trying to figure out why she's still single
I’ve always meant to read through my childhood journals. I pictured candles and sound bowls, incense and self discovery, organic tears, a more holistic understanding of my formative years.
This is something I’ve never gotten around to.
First, because my patience is an excruciatingly limited commodity. There are so many journals that if I tried to read them all, I would be forced to spend the rest of my life reading journals. Kind of like how if you lined up the entire population of China around the globe, it would never end given the rate of reproduction.
Second, I don’t own a sound bowl.
Therefore revisiting my journals is the result of the only catalyst for ever actually doing anything in my life: a deadline.
I was home visiting my family in the US over the holidays, which always moonlights as the perfect opportunity to order all of the good lotions that I can’t get abroad.
There’s a lot of things I like about living in Latin America, the beauty products are not one of them.
On this particular trip, it also meant that I needed to grab a journal to bring back with me as well. I’d just added a paid subscription to this newsletter which includes, Dear God, regular entries of my childhood journals (shameless plug).
And in order to do that, I have to actually read the journals.
Considering the amount of time I spend writing about my feelings, I’m surprisingly un self-aware. So (once again) I envisioned myself lounging around in dim lighting, eating foods that delighted my senses, selecting passages to include in the newsletter.
What actually happened is that I’d been so busy mail ordering toiletries that all other life obligations fell to the wayside. And I found myself rummaging around my parents’ storage unit cramming last minute things into my suitcase in the godforsaken hours of the morning before driving down the trusty country roads of Arroyo Grande, California to catch my flight for Rio de Janeiro.
I didn’t have a chance to open the journal until I was lying on a beach towel a few weeks later, smothered in sunscreen and mosquito repellant in a meager attempt to avoid both skin cancer and dengue.
And, because even a beach day needs to be productive, I began to read.
Turns out, I had grabbed Freshman Year of High School Part 1, the 14-year-old edition.
The year was 2006.
I had a middle part, with freshly-grown-out bangs, meant to indicate that I was no longer in junior high — I was changing schools, which clearly required a more sophisticated haircut.
The bangs, however, hadn't entirely gotten the memo and had only managed to grow a fraction over summer. This remaining quarter inch allowed me to tuck them behind my ears with such greasy severity that they resembled drooping antennas.
There was nothing, and I repeat nothing, attractive about it.
It was the era of wearing a tank top underneath every shirt (for modesty’s sake), and color-coordinating it to match my homemade beaded necklace and equally homemade headband.
I know this only because journal entries at the age of 14 followed the below formula:
I had just come from a fine arts academy with a graduating class of 30 students, and the mascot of a monarch butterfly. It was the type of middle school where no one even made fun of having a butterfly mascot.
My parents moved the summer before high school, which flung this matching-headband-and-necklace-wearing child into the deep end of 2,000 strangers.
They decided that I would meet new friends in the two week band camp before freshman year began. For context, I played the tuba.
In arts school playing tuba as a girl gave you cool points. In high school, it turns out, those cool points were nontransferable.
But this was a concept I hadn’t yet grasped.
Opening the journal 17 years after I’d last closed it, I was cheerily welcomed to the first page by an unexpected drawing of a tampon with teeth. It thrilled me to no end.
During freshman year of AP English we learned about foreshadowing. Too bad I never really paid attention in AP English, or I might have taken this as foreshadowing that the entire journal would not be what I was expecting.
“For the past month I have been waiting, yes, waiting to get my period so that I could try tampons,” I wrote on the verge of tears (I know the verge of tears part because, like most things, it too got documented).
“And then here my period comes, and nothing goes as expected!!!”
I just couldn’t figure out how tampons worked, and they might just be the worst, most horrible thing ever and maybe I would try again in 100,000 years.
(For the record, I have since figured out how to work a tampon, and even managed to do so in less than the allotted 100,000 year time frame ! Am still patiently awaiting trophy)
The tampon incident is proceeded by a series of predictions made the evening before my first day of high school. They are as follows:
Three people will offer me drugs during my freshman year
Seven people will offer me drugs throughout all of high school
I’m curious as to the disproportionality of these numbers, and why so many people would be offering me drugs freshman year in comparison to the remaining three years.
However understanding the passage of time might not have been my forte, as demonstrated in the aforementioned tampon chronicles.
There’s a childish awe in the lime green pages of the journal that feels out of place against the cement and cinder block of high school and the stone-faced students that fill it.
It only took four days of high school to start wondering whether or not I was good looking. “I really would like to know if I’m hot or not,” I wrote, as though penning a letter for Teen Vogue readers to take a vote.
“I really hope I’m hot, but I’m pretty sure that this isn’t my life for that!” I concluded a couple of sentences later.
Unbothered, I moved on to more pressing matters, like how I’d already used up all of my text messages for the month and there were still 15 more days to go!
I was officially the fastest girl in PE (when Mel didn’t try) and it was stressing me out, like, a lot.
Because, the thing was, I didn’t want to let Mrs. Varvel down.
Because now that Mrs. Varvel knew that I could run sort of fast, she pushed me to run even faster, and that was a lot of pressure.
These days, thirty-one-year-old me no longer keeps a journal to the intensity that 14-year-old me used to, but if she did, there would have been an entry a few months ago about how getting second place in a long-distance race was the worst thing she could have done (even though I’m still convinced it was a fluke).
But now that my coach knows I can run sort of fast on a good day, he tries to make every day an even better day.
And while he seems to think I’ve come to practice to represent my country, I don’t have the heart to tell him I’m just there to run off all the caffeine I drink.
So I let myself be singled out, and I think about how things were a lot more fun when my coach didn’t know that I can push myself to the point of almost throwing up.
And as much as I’d like to think that this 14-year-old and I have nothing in common but a shared stride, we’re kind of more the same person than we’re not.
Reading back my thoughts at 14, it was clear that I’d outgrown child, but adult didn’t quite fit either.
There are Broadway quotes littered throughout the entire journal and multiple self-interviews including captivating questions like favorite color (lime green with purple dots) and favorite animal (in 3rd grade I wouldn’t have hesitated to say dolphin, in 7th & 8th grade it was turtle, but now… who knows?)
There was the childishness of willingly making (and eating) a peanut butter-salami-egg salad sandwich for lunch at a band competition, crashing up against the adultness of helping a friend practice the song he was going to sing to ask his crush out (which is about how adult it gets at 14).
The song was “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None The Richer, and it was one of my favorites.
I didn’t like like this friend at all, but as he sat next to me singing, I couldn’t help but think how I’d always imagined myself being serenaded by this song (back when I thought dating was just singing to one another).
“And I was kinda being serenaded- it was just practice for another girl though”
A few pages away there’s the youngness of grabbing a handful of cookies from a buffet, only to turn around and run smack into a cute guy, feeling very very aware of just how many cookies I’m clutching.
On Wednesday, September 13 I was walking to the bus stop at the end of my neighborhood, when a lady asked me whether the bus went to the junior high or the high school. She told me that her son didn’t currently ride the bus, but since I was taking it, he might want to start. “Then she laughed, I’m not quite sure what she meant!!!”
It was like everybody else had access to the manual for my body, except me. They’d make comments that I’d grasp about 30 percent of, and I’d write the rest in my journal and shrug in the way you do when you don’t quite get just how much you’re not quite getting.
Reading it back I can pick up the subtleties of the comments, and I know now what they all mean. However it feels unfair that there’s some parts of being 14, that I had to wait until 31 to fully understand.
You were a lot more innocent than me at 14. I’m happy for you - it’s a good thing! It’s really interesting to read about a “normal” 14 year old’s thoughts and feelings. Thanks for sharing!