Christmas 1976 and Beyond

 

I was five years old and in kindergarten when I made that strange little thing, a drawing of me dancing in a pink tutu. I only drew myself in a tutu because all the other little girls were saying that they were going to be ballerinas and I didn't want to be a ballerina but back then I just went with the crowd. I did like green though, so I used my green crayon to do my drawing. I mixed up the purple with the black crayon though. My shoes were supposed to be black. I printed my name in pencil on the drawing then the whole thing was cut out and shellacked to a piece of thin plywood by one of my teachers. She also added a bit of green yarn to hang it up by.

 

That thing has been living in my trunk of things for decades. It lives in the same trunk where I keep many decades worth of photograpsh and journals. (I ran out of room in that trunk for journals, so now I put completed journals into big covered totes which are stacked in the back closet.)  The oldest of my journals goes back not to 1976 but to a decade later, 1986. In the oldest of them, I had just turned 15 and I was a typically insufferable teenager, angsty and dramatic, a boy-crazy jerk. 

 

I've thought about transcribing my journals and posting them to this blog. Wouldn't that be...I was going to say hilarious, but I think maybe it would be more wrenching and self-centered than hilarious. But I don't know. My recent re-reading of the 1986 journal made me realize that I could never upload it without editing. I wouldn't try to make myself seem better necessarily. There isn't any way to actually do that; I was a teenager. So what would I take out? All the embarrassing sex stuff actually.  Unfortunately, I was exhaustive in my cataloguing of all the embarrassing sex stuff--exhaustive, like, clinically exhaustive--so what remains would likely be pretty slim pickings. But I would leave in the drugs and the drinking! There was certainly enough of that. (I was not a bad kid, but I don't think people would have been able to tell that from reading my journals.)

 

What happens to all these journals when I am gone? They're dust and I won't care obviously, but there is a site in Ohio that collects people's old diaries, the American Diary Project. I've though about leaving my journals to them. Is it worth it I wonder. In the future will people care about the angsty scrawls of a 15 year old girl in the mid-1980s?