Letters to Nobody (and Everybody)

My friend Cathy does a hysterical series over on her blog called Throwback to Hell, which usually features a dissection of one of her old middle school era diary entries - bonus points if there are corresponding pictures. Sometimes she has guest writers post in this series, and I've been trying for months to drag together a decent submission. I don't have all my old journals, but I have several. I'm having a hard time finding something appropriate, because while Cathy manages to find entries that are mostly funny and only a little bit pathetic, everything that I am finding is mostly pathetic and not really funny at all.

There is a very deep and heartbreaking loneliness that permeates just about everything I wrote in my early adolescence. I often kept journals that weren't entirely private - they were series of letters, written to whichever friend I was desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to get to understand me at the time. Many of these journals actually have written responses from those friends within them, chastising me for things like jealousy and co-dependence and childish behavior - and I was definitely guilty of all of those things. I am not close to any of the girls that I wrote to and for as a young teenager, so there isn't even a way to look back on it and say "look at us" - it's all just "look at me... failing, again, to connect." That doesn't really make for light-hearted blog fun, though I suspect many can relate to that kind of sadness.

That failure to connect has been a theme in my life - constantly seeking my sisters and constantly two steps behind, running to catch up and never quite making it. Sometimes - often - blogging feels like that. An attempt to connect, to make someone understand, to feel like someone SEES me, really sees me. It sometimes feels like the safest way to feel vulnerable... though if my old journals full of letters have taught me anything, your heart is never really safe when you pour it out for someone else to read. I am apparently not a fast learner in this regard.

In keeping with this particular blog's theme though... I often wish I could reach through time and reassure my fourteen year old self that despite her insecurities, she has a right to be here, "no less than the trees and the stars."