The revival of Diary Friday

Yes, Beth, yes, Dad, yes, siblings, and old friends from high school (and the couple of you out there who don’t know me who enjoyed that stuff) … I have decided to bring back the old Diary Friday feature. This was one of the things I started, the second I started up this site in 2002: post entries from my journals, every Friday. I have kept a journal since I was 11 years old. I have literally boxes and boxes of them stashed away in various cupboards up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Journal-keeping is a habit with me. I rarely look through them – except when I’m trying to get inspired to start a new story, a new essay, whatever. I wrote stuff down in those long-ago days that I would NEVER remember now … and sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a bad thing. Like – who wants to remember in detail the pain and angst of adolescence? However, sometimes, just sometimes, I can read my yowls of teenage agony about this or that, and I start to laugh so hard that tears stream down my face.

I love that feeling. It gives one perspective. It helps you (me) not to take things so damn seriously.

I stopped doing “Diary Friday” mainly because the readership got way bigger. And strangers were reading me. I posted that stuff mainly for my parents, my siblings, and my friends – who were the only people who read me at first. I suddenly got shyer about sharing some of this old stuff. I did get a couple of sweet emails from “strangers” out there, saying, “I hope you bring back those diary entries. I loved them.”

So I’m mainly posting this stuff for my family and friends, who are all co-stars in these old entries – and also to those of you out there who were bummed when I stopped the “feature”, whatever you want to call it. I’m also posting these entries to the people out there who have kept journals, who remember what it was like to be a teenager, and who can revel in their own memories here in my comments section. I realize that not too many people out there would ever want to share unedited versions of their high school diaries. However, I find it amusing, cathartic, and interesting. The emails I got from strangers, some of the comments left by strangers in those posts … were all along the lines of: “Wow, I SO remember feeling that way when I was 14 … It brought back so many memories – I cringe when I remember how awkward I was, or that time when I … blah blah blah”

This is the main reason I want to post these things. If it’s cathartic for me to share this stuff, then I have got to believe it’s cathartic for people to read it. Not everybody – some people will probably cringe in horror at these journal entries. That’s fine. I’m not posting them for you.

You out there … who loved this stuff … These are for you.

I’ll be posting an entry shortly. It’s a doozy.