Soft, Pliable, and Plush: A Journaling Retrospective

This is a photograph that I took on-campus at Soka. The sky is lit up with a beautiful orange and yellow sunset. There are shadowed outlines of trees and mountains in the foreground.

For today’s blog post, I thought it might be fun to look through some of my old journals. I picked up a journal from my senior year of high school and boy there is a lot of post-worthy content in this thing.

As a deeply dysfunctional and slightly egotistical being, I was working on a fictionalized memoir. To my humiliation, later pages of this journal show that I was also adapting it into a play, complete with a staging diagram. As part of my research for this endeavor, I wrote out detailed quotes from my older journals, and I copied down several of my text conversations.

I have kept everyone mentioned in these entries anonymous when writing this blog post. I have also, as much as possible, avoided telling stories that would make the people therein clearly identifiable.

With that being said, let’s move onto a few observations that I was tempted to tweet out while writing this blog post.

In describing one of my former crushes, I say that “If a helium balloon with a smile drawn on its face had a personality, that would be X.” I also describe the “awkward beanstalk glory” of another crush. Weird metaphors have never been my forte, but they have always been my passion.

I was trying to keep a record of anyone who might possibly have had a crush on me at any point in my life. Regarding one classmate, I wrote "One week, he started being weirdly chivalrous and put my chair on the table for me, despite having few chair usage skills".

I found an entry documenting a conversation that was apparently meaningful to 12th Grade Lydia, but that I had completely forgotten. The end of this journal entry reads “And so there it is. The entire elephant story”, which makes the story sound much more interesting than it is.

Permission to write terrible poetry was dangerous in the hands of small Lydia. I regret to inform you that the excerpts below are from a poem I wrote at age 17, after the poem went through several revision stages.

Your messages lit up my Kindle Fire

Hours after I had planned to expire.

            …………………………………………

One Thursday, I didn’t know what to say.

I sort of hoped you’d be my bae.

I became soft, pliable, and plush,

But I told myself that it wasn’t a crush.

…………………………………………

I couldn’t read books or enjoy hot tea.

So, to end my addiction,

I replaced you with angry fanfiction

…………………………………………

Writing didn’t cure my disease

My feelings hurt like nipping fleas.

It would take over a season of Glee

To bury the hurt inside of me.

…………………………………………

Looking through these excerpts has made me reflect on writing, and the many roles it has played in my life. Ever since my teenage years, writing has felt like sloughing off dead skin, a necessary removal of some part of me too repulsive to remain. Although my terrible poetry and ever-present obsession with documenting even the lightest of feelings might suggest otherwise, I wrote to survive, and to process what felt like a difficult and unforgiving existence.

As much as I laugh at my former self, I cannot help but be grateful for Younger Lydia's writing. High School Lydia was going through it, and I'm glad that I had writing to lean on as a way to move forward. I can't even pretend that I was, by necessity, a Bad Writer; I managed to produce thoughtful and meaningful work in other contexts. My journal simply felt like a place to grapple with the difficult realities of trying to be my authentic self, or to perform a fluffier, less complicated self until I was ready to seek out ~my true identity~.

I hope that you, dear reader, have enjoyed watching me do The Cringe. If you like reading snippets from my old journals and rambling commentary on writing, let me know! (Preferably, let me know via a comment to this blog post, or via a similar method that does not involve an in-person conversation regarding my old journal entries.) Although I still have a lot of travel content to write, I really enjoyed writing this post and would love to write more posts like it in the future.