I have over 20 years of journals, that start from the age of 13 with seemingly mundane hormonal girl reflections, quickly delving into a long, drawn-out battle with substances and myself, spanning the entirety of the 20 years. Add in a dash of chaos, trauma, and beauty here and there. Autobiographical/Memoir Fodder - starting with direct quotes from my journals from 20+ years ago.
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Friday Night - March 29th, 2002
11:24pm:
I think I’ll start from the beginning. I’m C, I’m 13, and in 8th grade. I get along with most of my class but don’t really like them. Now I’ll describe people you may hear about in this thing - not a journal, not a diary - but something that may turn into a novel - haha. Yeah, there is KS - a love interest of mine. LOL, we went out a little bit last year (*2000) then never talked then in the beginning of this year (*2001) I got a call from him out of nowhere and we became like best friends. Finally it got into a “relationship” if you can call it that. We kissed a bit, only really made-out once…then after many rumors of me cheating (I hang out with a lot of guys) and one rumor that KS didn’t like me anymore and was just going to stop calling and “brush me off” and see if I got the hints. Which I did. I confronted him and after a lot “I don’t knows” he broke it off. It was for the better I guess. I would always blame myself for anything that went wrong - GS always says it’s not my fault and KS doesn’t know what he’s missing (or whatever). GS is my almost Best Friend, lol, I met him, hell, I don’t know like last year. He’s a punk rocker (lol) he has a band it’s pretty cool actually. TG was my BFF since kinderworks, last year, though she moved to PT. I’m going to go watch home movies of us from 1992 - I’ll be back…
12:17am
Alright I’m sorry enough with the movies, although I was the coolest fucking kid ever! Alright so KS DUMPED me 3 weeks ago on Tuesday and says he’ll call me sometime. I don’t expect him to call, but I trust that he will because I don’t think he would want to hurt me. But today at 6:23 all of a sudden he calls, (like I knew he would, just didn’t really expect) and chats with me like nothing happened, I don’t mind, but I think something inside me still wants him. Sad eh? Oh well, I miss him is all, he was a good friend even without us going out. Well I’m going to put on some good movie (maybe Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and go to sleep - I have to meet TW (a now sophomore that used to go to my school that I used to seriously crush on). I have to meet him at noon, he’s smoking me up :) gotta love him for it, plus he’s still really sweet to me. Almost as if hitting on me but not wanting anything to happen. Also I have to meet JJ (a junior, my sisters friend, and mine) sometime I’m buying a 1/4 from him for $60, it’s going to fucking rule. Anyways, “goodnight” as TW says to me. Oh and I said to meet at 12 and he was like, “it’s a date”. I laughed. AHAHAHAHA - LATER.
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The readings are painful. Sometimes in how silly I sound, or later how desperate, how boy crazy. At times I appear obsessed, relentlessly searching and trying to fill the void with anything and everything - drugs, boys, cutting. Thirteen is a brutal age, a difficult and interesting age. Being thirteen and attending a K-8 school with only 52 kids (just 6 in your 8th grade class), with every other town (and kids your age) 20+ minutes away with no public transportation, in the early 2000s, makes for an even more difficult and interesting age. The dawn of the internet golden era. Of AIM, Napster, Limewire, dial-up, of not being on the phone and internet at the same time. Of chat rooms and A/S/L, of rotten.com. Fuck man, we still had pay phones and barely had cell phones. We asked Jeeves and MapQuest, we did Mavis Beacon. We transitioned off tapes to CDs, off floppy disks. We were birthed around the same time as Reality Television, and went through puberty with Paris and Nicole, Kendra, Holly, and Bridgette, and the Girls Gone Wild. Modern day sexualizing young girls turned many of us into our own girl gone wild, “Go Ask Alice”, or “Augusta Gone” - but hey what the fuck else is new?
That first entry from March of 2002 was right near the start of it all really, the decent - and it went downhill pretty quickly after that. In 6 short months - after graduating 8th grade and turning 14 - I would do countless different types of drugs, sleep with multiple different guys, fool around with others, steal drugs, overdose (on my own medication), get a concussion, be regularly partying with adults, get sent away, steal more drugs, have a little menty-b, and get kicked out of school, and finally get sent to a wilderness treatment program. 2002 was quite the year, and that’s only half of it.
Come along for the ride #tryingtofindtheocean