Chapter 2.

I have kept some kind of journal since I was eight. My first one was a birthday present: pink, with a tiny lock and key, “Dear Diary” written in gold script on the cover. I loved it, so fancy! I lost the key, and that was the end of the Ur “Dear Diary”. However, it instilled my habit of writing and drawing in notebooks. I don’t remember feeling a need to hide anything I wrote until I turned fifteen when I started writing about things that shouldn’t be discovered. I kept those journals with me, or hid them where I hoped they wouldn’t be found.

There are boxes of my notebooks in our basement, journals from 1989 on, filled with my excessive self-scrutiny. I don’t look at them, or re-read much. For the most part, I’m not as interesting as I think I am. There are occasional time gaps of weeks to months in those entries because I don’t write when I am really depressed, and I don’t want to be reminded of bad times. Months can go by, then I’m Back! with little mention of what kept me away. “Rough patch…” was the start of an entry after a long interval in 2013-2014. The collection is not complete, though. Those from when I was fifteen to twenty two are long gone. I was told they were thrown away.

January 9, 2019. I started a new journal before the old one was filled–a symbolic move hoping a new one would give me a new perspective. It did not work. My retreat from writing had whittled down to random guilt-ridden rants about wasting my time, shame that I wasn’t living the dream as a novelist. A perfect example was my 1/9/19 Subject: Back to Journaling–one long, run-on sentence of self rebuke. Happy fucking new year.

January and February, 2019. Six entries in the new journal, three references to what I called white shocks that feel like flashbacks which caused physical pain, mostly in my chest, and really upsetting. Feb. 21, 2019. …I don’t want to write about this shit. I’m so done with it, it’s over. It’s been over for almost 30 years, no almost 40 years, Holy fucking shit. On Feb. 24, 2019 I made a list of things I was thinking on a Sunday morning. The list ended up with 14 things, starting with with to-do, then should-do, then, completely out of the blue: 13. I was sexually, physically & emotionally abused from age 12 or 13. It’s hard to get my mind around that. It does affect me, especially with intimacy… 14. Ultimately I believe I am stronger than #13.

Feb. 26, 2019 Intrusive thoughts. I have that incredible crushing feeling-more and more lately…it goes so far back. I haven’t thought of this stuff for years…I wish I could have known-and gotten away-if I could go back to one particular day to change things…to what started everything. I was 13…. There is part of me that is dead inside when I think of it. No. I feel sick-I feel scared, alone. I can’t talk. It was wrong. But I’m strong. I can hide things, so that is that…. except when the news hits with stories about teachers. I’m so sure he must be shitting his pants every time a creepy molester story hits, but I know that’s wrong. I am the one that is lost and crap my proverbial pants over this. HE has never seen it as anything but what he could do. So I either move on or do something about it. And seeing the shit that happens to people who try to do something about this kind of abuse, I need to move on.

That would be the last entry in the journal for months.