My journal from when I was 13

I was looking through some old boxes and I came across a journal I wrote when I was 13. I kept a journal from age 13 to about 25. Email pretty much killed it. I used to write long letters to my sister, but email killed that too. A shame.

Reading through what I wrote when I was 13 I found out that my spelling and writing were way worse than I imagined: afreash, to your heart’s contempt, it was there book.

I sounded like a mix between Pooh Bear and some news reporter:

It’s a good thing that the sun rises, because otherwise people would begin to worry.

Details will be released later.

She told me to forget, to pretend it never happened, I said okay, but I still remember.

Almost every sentence is put together the same way and has the same beat, making it sound boring. Only the point of view makes it interesting reading. It surprises me how much better my writing got over the course of the next ten years: not a difference of degree – like fewer English mistakes – but of kind. Somehow I learned to put my words and sentences together in a completely different way.

Back then I was always missing the forest for the trees: I knew what I ate for breakfast, but missed the bigger picture. At one point I wrote about what a television is – it makes you see how much they have changed since then – but I talked about it as a machine and left out what you can watch and how all that comes about. Over and over again you see me taking everything at face value like that, looking at things on their outsides and not thinking about their insides.

There was a girl I was taken with at the time, June. She made my heart race, so I pursued her. But now when I read through my journal I can see that there was another girl, Claire, that I had a deeper love for, but I took her for granted. My heart did not race when I sat next to her, but somehow whenever I was with her everything felt right. Like she was my missing half. I was too young to know how rare that is.

If I could somehow talk to my 13-year-old self now, I would tell him to go for Claire, not June: for the girl he loves deep in his heart, not the one who turns his head.

I am thinking of maybe making parts of my old journals into a blog – at least the less cringe-worthy parts. Like how some people put the journals of Pepys or Orwell on the Internet one day at a time as blogs. Just change the names to protect the innocent. The advantage is that it would be easier to read – out on the Internet, not packed away in some box. Also I might get comments, which would be interesting.

– Abagond, 2008.

Update (2020): That journal is now lost. A huge regret of mine. But for that reason I started keeping a journal again.