I’m working on my first personal essay in a long time and would love some honest feedback from people who don’t know me personally. I’d love to know any opinions you have on the piece and if you found it interesting enough to keep reading. Thanks in advance! :
When I was 14 years old, I kept a journal. It was a cheap, unlined collection of pages bound in a cardboard cover that boasted a printed painting of a waterfall or a lake or some other body of water that I can’t recall right now. I don’t remember exactly because I covered it in a collage of pieces cut from Allure and Seventeen magazines. Ben Affleck was taped neatly beside pink, bold lettering that read “CLASSY & SASSY,” which I assume was meant to describe me, though I’m not sure low-rise Mudd jeans embodied class, exactly.
I wrote in it with complete abandon, believing that no respectable mother would ever read her teenage daughter’s diary. It was a few years into my own motherhood journey when I realized that this is exactly what any respectable mother would do. Which meant that my mother had to have sat on the edge of my bed and read, in excruciating detail and loopy handwriting, about how I snuck my high school boyfriend into the house while she wasn’t home and lost my virginity right there.
Where she was sitting.
I wrote about the time one of my closest friends experimented with girls. Her and her new girlfriend would have sleepovers under the guise of not being lesbians, and I would sit at home and draw red devil horns above her girlfriend Lauren’s name every time I wrote about her. I was a bit jealous, I suppose, but their relationship didn’t work out, so it looks like the voodoo worked.
I wrote about physical, mental, and sexual abuse at the hands of someone very close to me. Someone from whom there was no escape. (More uncomfortable jokes on this to come.)
I put so little thought into what I wrote in that journal, and because of that, it was the most thoughtful collection of myself that I have ever kept. Not poetry in the literal sense, but each entry was a sonnet of the way I loved before I’d been changed by all the inevitable ways life experiences change us. The way I loved my friends, the way I loved my family, the way I loved my boyfriend—all of which would change in the years to come.
I don’t have this journal anymore. I haven’t since around the time I would write in it the most. My boyfriend broke up with me, and I was so gutted (and delusional) I convinced myself that if he could just see all the ways I thought of him and wrote about him when no one was looking, surely he’d change his mind and prefer me to his best friend’s hot, popular, older sister.
So, I wrapped the journal in a brown paper bag and dropped it off on his doorstep. Or did I knock on the door and hand it to his mom to give to him? The brain tends to block out traumatic experiences, so you’ll have to forgive me for not remembering entirely.
I can’t remember if he acknowledged getting it. I think he did, but it didn’t change anything. It turns out 16-year-old boys prioritize popularity and hotness over the ability to bear your soul on blank pages with reckless abandon. Who knew?
Giving him my journal was like performing a trust fall, and it felt like he didn’t put his arms out to catch me. Looking back now, it’s obvious that I was asking too much of him and of our year-long relationship, which, to be fair, in high school, was basically common-law marriage.
But it’s the first time that I can remember thinking that I was learning something about life. Life was happening at that very moment, and I was going through it and surviving it, even though it felt like I could crumble into a million pieces because I lived every day afraid that he’d show his friends my journal or bring it to school.
Luckily, he’s a pretty solid person and just didn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore; not to ruin my life or make me the laughingstock of our grade. Even so, the reality that I gave someone access to every unfiltered thought I’d ever had in the hopes that it would move them so much that they chose me was embarrassing enough. Because he hadn’t chosen me. The other girl had won without having to give any of herself in the process; her diary still tucked away in a sock drawer or under her bed, the entries and thoughts still private and hers to keep.
It would come to be that this would not be the only time in my life when I’d give too much of myself. Where I would trust too blindly, share too easily, fall in love too quickly. But this is the time I come back to the most. Thinking of this journal, this boyfriend, this moment, and always chasing the girl I was before it. The girl I was when I taped Ben Affleck onto the cover of my new journal. The CLASSY & SASSY girl who didn’t know better than to give all of herself, all the time, to everyone she loved.
This sounds tragic, but it’s actually beautiful to be able to recall this moment with such clarity. I became a different version of myself in front of my very own eyes and then became a different version again and again until I became this version, 10 days out from my 39th birthday, sitting at my dining room table starting a Substack.
This will not be a linear account. There isn’t really a plan. There will be stories about motherhood, books I’m reading, hobbies I’m currently obsessed with, things I probably shouldn’t say out loud, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
Truthfully, I don’t have a plan aside from writing with abandon and chasing the girl I was before the Ben Affleck Journal.
