Hello, me.

I spent last night curled up in my office going through my memory chest. I read through old journals starting when I went off to NYU and through my sophmore year at University of Arizona. Then I skipped ahead to read my first year in NY after grad and then my journal when I first met Michael. It was really fun for me. I haven't looked back in a while.
It was like reading a journal of some other young girl. I don't know her really. I can't relate to her. I feel sorry for her. I was rooting for her and was so happy when she came into her own and met her future husband. It was like someone else's story.
I may have had to distance myself a bit, because it was embarassing. I did so many stupid things! I was terribly insecure and tried all the wrong things in order to make people like me. Every page chronicling that 19 and 20 year old girl's life is full of angst and anger and passion and frustration. I often wrote pep talks to myself, but I never believed them. I kept making the same mistakes over and over again.
I was so obsessed with finding love. I wanted to it so badly. Boys. Sex. Boys. I wish I had written more about my classes and my friends and the fun things I did, but it's always about boys.
There were a few interesting bits as I slowly grew up and away from my family. You could almost hear a ripping sound as I realized that my parents weren't perfect and that I could live a separate life from them. I wrote this, "I don't think my parents will every love me as much as I love them.". Do most people feel this as they grow up and away? It seemed to me such an odd thing to write. I also found it hard to hold on to the "new" me I was building at school when I came back home. It's sad and bittersweet to realize that I was so unsure of who I was that I didn't have grasp of it enough to move from location to location.
I wrote some pretty good poetry in there. And I pasted some different pictures and clips of things that were important to me then and it's neat to see what they were.
It was also neat to look ahead and see how much the topics of my journal entries changed as I grew up and got happy. I loved to read my first writings of when I met Michael. Two months after we met I confessed to my journal that this was the man I would marry and have children with. That I had found my true love.
In the bottom of the chest were letters and cards that meant something to me. I loved all of them. I hadn't opened that chest since my first Christmas as a married woman. I need to start putting a few things in there again. It makes for an interesting walk down memory lane.