...lest she turn into the kind of 29 year old who publishes her innermost thoughts on the internet, starts a substack to "reclaim the trauma" of her privacy lost, blah blah blah. But, that is the hand god has dealt us!
I would never call myself a "writer," but it’s always been a big part of my life. My immigrant mother taught me to read and write before I started kindergarten. She encouraged me to keep a diary when most of my peers were standing slack-jawed and nose-to-nose with Spongebob. My mom graded each diary entry using a codified system of colorful Sanrio stickers. After enough stickers earned, she would buy me a reward (usually a book).
In middle school, long after the retirement of her incentivized journaling program, I kept my own private diary that I updated much more sporadically. Some of the entries were disturbingly violent (I apparently wished death on a lot of people for minor infractions). Most of them, though, were devoted to a raging crush I harbored for two years on a boy named A. I waxed poetic about the endearing way his hair bleached from chlorine and sun. In one entry, I described how my knees literally trembled whenever he talked to me. “I thought that only happened in movies!!” I wrote.
Even now at nearly 30, discovering that my mom had been reading my diary while I was away at school ranks as one of the most mortifying realizations of my life. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it stands out to me as a crucial moment of innocence lost—where the crystallized world as you know it shatters. Nothing I felt was sacred, not even my innermost fears and desires. I never kept a physical diary again.
But the impulse to write—really, to keep a record of my thoughts—never went away. Like many girls in 2008, I started a tumblr, faithfully updating it throughout high school. Salinger excerpts and Lana del Rey lyrics, screen grabs from The Virgin Suicides, Polaroids of girls I found pretty smoking cigarettes and wearing American Apparel. Later on, the woes and monotony of college applications. At a cursory glance the blog is a mess, a schizophrenic mishmash of the musings and aesthetic interests of a suburban teenage girl. And yet now it strikes me as one of my most genuine, heartfelt expressions. I can't remember ever in irony-poisoned adulthood baring myself so earnestly like that.
Today, as a WFH desk lackey, I find myself reading and writing less. And in the current zeitgeist, where everything has to have an endgame (usually in the form of monetization), there is little practical reason to do so. Anyway, for some reason it would feel perverse to try to make a side hustle out of what is essentially a neurotic impulse (the act of writing).
Mostly, I want to return to a state of innocence, to access the mode I once operated from: the kind that makes you painstakingly cobble together pictures you took and observations you made, because you felt they were worthy of preservation and contemplation and even love. Even if to an audience of zero. It's entirely possible that I'm being naive and solipsistic, rhapsodizing into the void like this as though I were 12 again. But it's the only honesty I know.
-D
Youth Lagoon - 17 (a certified teenage Dee classic)
I miss you and those days, Carl <3 glad you're here!
Deanna, I've been inspired by your writing ever since we created our wacky high school stories in the library while waiting for our moms to pick us up 😂 you definitely have a talent and I can't wait to read more
Carolyn