It’s time to be honest.
Do you ever go down a rabbit hole into your past? I desperately try not to most of the time, but I was recently reminded that Livejournal.com was once a very big part of my life. I would pour my heart and soul into this thing, fully knowing that my friends and even some of my classmates might read it. It was both an act of bravery but also one of naivety and risk.
It started in about 2000-2001 as a way to record my mundane, everyday life, which included many proclamations of “love,” my accusations of perceived child abuse against my single mother, and vague statements about the state of certain friendships that grew more cryptic with age.
I spent hours clicking through page after page of these little entries under my second Livejournal username (there were three), hoping for a glimpse into life before things got too complicated. But back then, it was all complicated to me.
A lot of it made me wince (some words and phrases didn’t age well) but allowing myself to relive some of these memories that I had mostly forgotten about put me back into my teenaged head and heart but with a “zoomed out” and wiser perspective to bounce things off of.
And in the spirit of transparency and openness in line with my former M.O., I’m going to name what I see in all of these posts:
I see a very lonely girl who just wanted to be loved on. My father and grandma had died when I was 13 and 15, and they just happened to be the two closest family members who bestowed affection and love on me. Once they were gone, any “I love you’s” were almost non-existent and hugs were few and far between. I wasn’t shy about expressing this, either. I craved love – hard. And in the same strain, I really wanted to be liked, so much. A lot of my writing back then expressed worry that I had upset someone. Pulling back on all of this, it makes sense. My home life was chaotic and my peace and happiness was dependent on conditions that I had to meet. I was programmed for this kind of relationship.
I could see this play out in my very early romantic relationships, especially my very first, where my level of happiness was based on how my boyfriend spoke to me. A day could be shattered if he didn’t call or said something on AIM that sounded weird. I often asked myself what was wrong with me and assumed I was doing something wrong if he wasn’t hugging or kissing me. As I grew older, I bucked against these conditional relationships, casting others’ bullshit aside as I gained more independence and deeper thought.
In therapy, I’m learning to address my younger self to help process feelings I had and heal from trauma. I guess the idea is to speak to that hurt part that still, deep down, exists and provide the help and support that I didn’t have then. It’s easy with 20/20 hindsight vision of course, but hard not to judge myself. I just want to give teenage me so much love and reassurance that it wasn’t my fault — that those around me were dealing with their own issues and I need not take it all to heart. But most importantly, I need to say, “I hear you.” Honestly, reading through some of my posts, I found myself almost as indignant as if I were in that moment again. I really do “hear” me when I explained how I felt.
I’m really grateful that I kept these little diaries. At the time, it was how we connected with friends online, but now I see that it’s much more valuable than that. I laid all my feelings and thoughts out there and now I have a record of it that helps me put some of the pieces together, come to terms and reassure myself that I really did go through certain things.
I had been pretty open with people online through my writing up through the time I became a reporter. That’s when it really stopped — and rightly so. It’s the job of a reporter to eliminate any appearance of bias but also way to protect oneself. My name became a byline, meaning if people wanted to, they could scrutinize me. Why would I open myself up to that?
But now, having been a journalist for almost 10 years, I’ve noticed that I’ve silenced myself too much and over-corrected, maybe. And in these recent days, I think we need more honesty and transparency…more humanity. So that’s what I want to do more of. I want to be real about things but also have the ability to express myself in the format I’m most comfortable and skilled at. I want to take back a little bit of the bravery I once had to bear a part of myself to the world.
This is my blog – my space – so I’m going to use it as such.