Tara’s wonderful blog post earlier this summer with excerpts from her childhood journal sent me in search of my own journals. I wondered if perhaps I, too, was a charming and precocious child. It turns out I didn’t keep journals much–the only one I could find is from seventh grade. Distinctly not charming. In fact, it is as excruciating and awkward as I myself was at that age.

A significant portion is devoted to imagining how everyone I know would react if a) I suddenly died b) I ran away (the town is “monotonous and cruel”) or c) they read the journal. I was sure that one schoolmate would come away from reading it with an awareness of “how shallow she is.” I did not spend any time wondering how my older self would respond. Clearly I had too much trust in future me, who has no compunction about outing past me on the internets.

But some of it still caught my eye. A little meditation on how it feels to stand at the plate in a ball game, scraping dust off one toe with the other, and try to remember everything your coach told you. A dissection of why I prefer to be angry than happy (it’s more interesting!), and a side note on how God communicates. I’m glad I did sometimes duck out of the maelstrom of the age and take note.