I’m reading the diary I kept when I was 13. The one I got for my bat mitzvah, the one with my name embossed on the inside front cover, only it’s spelled incorrectly. (Who leaves out the final E in Michelle? You may have your one-L-or-two preference, but that last E is pretty crucial.)

(I mistakenly hit “3″ instead of “E” just now and had a mad impulse to start signing my name “M!ch3LL3,” but I’m sure someone is already doing that. And fortunately the impulse passed.)

I found this diary and two others the last time I was home (May 2009 — has it been that long?), out in the open in my brother’s old room that now serves as mostly a storage room and also as my nephew’s play room (my old room, or at least the room I stayed in when I was home from college, is now the computer room). I was mortified, even 25 years later, to think that my mom might have looked through them — though I think to her credit she would have opened one up, seen what was there, and shut it again without reading further. And if she read the one that I kept during my freshman and sophomore years in college, well, then, my mother knows a few things that I never wanted her to find out. And the thought that she might still read them was terrifying enough for me to scoop up all three journals and dump them in my suitcase and take them back to New York, all the while wishing I had a fireplace in which to burn them.

But not really. I knew I was going to read through them, but the first few pages of each one was enough to tell me that I wasn’t ready to. Funny, isn’t it? I was writing so long ago that it might as well not be me, and it’s not me, not really, but at the same time of course yeah it is. There were a couple things I glanced at that just made me wince, partly, I will admit, in embarrassment that I was ever this . . . STUPID (because in my present-day head I was never this stupid and I even have a number of testimonials from adults to the effect that I was altogether too grown-up and mature for my age, which . . . makes sense, actually, considering how immature adults really are) . . . but mostly because oh god, the anguish. The pain and the obsession and the desolation that comes with being 13.

I don’t know how many of you have kept the stuff you wrote, the personal stuff, from when you were that age, but 13-year-old me is breaking my heart. I just went through five pages of all the things she thought she needed to do to change and make people like her. (See, I have always had this ish.)

#1 on that list? “Don’t laugh a lot.”

Oof.

It’s too much. It’s not even that I want to hug her and tell her that everything is going to be OK, because you know, 13-year-old me wouldn’t listen to any adult, much less one the same age as her mother (ok, THAT’S FUCKED UP, PEOPLE). But I want to protect her, reach through the fabric of time and shield her from all the crap she’s dealing with now, and all the worse crap I know is coming in the next year. That’s diary #2, and it’s not going to be pretty.

At the same time, there is plenty of material here that I feel comfortable sharing with you all, because I think it is hilarious. And I also think it’s a good idea from time to time to remind ourselves of a basic truth — or at least, one of my basic truths — that what you think is so crucially important at the time may not actually stand the test of time, that taking a step back and gaining a little perspective never hindered one’s progress.

Related posts:

1. This time I mean it, there is REALLY nothing to see here.
2. TCB, GSD
3. A new challenge