When I was home in Philly recently, I cleaned out my closet…after over two years of saying I was going to do it. During my freshman year of college, my family moved into my grandmother’s house in a rush when she became ill, so I never had the chance to pack up my childhood bedroom. My mom did all that and since moving away, I haven’t been home for any extended period of time, so all of my stuff has really just been lumped in various niches of the house.
Well, in one box, I found all my journals (photo one) starting from the 2nd grade to the end of 12th grade. I decided to post them because I alluded to my Lion King journals before, and I think it is interesting to see how the covers and styles progress over the years. The last journal in the first photo is my current journal. The second photo, which I took about three minutes ago while talking to Trish on the phone—Oh, Manic Monday nights in NYC!—is of the journals I have kept since coming to NYU. Actually, I am missing (it is probably in some landfill) my journal from my first year of college. It was inside my handbag which was stolen after taking the El Train home late from UPenn that August. From everything that asshole took—my phone, iPod, camera, wallet, et cetera—that damn journal is what I mourn most. Everything else, though expensive and time consuming, was so replaceable.
When I was younger, I regarded my journals and photo albums with some kind of sacred awe, always sure of where they were, which was in an easy to grab place in case of a fire. I never had any trouble with the question: if there was a fire and you could save one thing, what would it be? My journals! I know the answer first, I win! Somebody would maybe bring up my pet parakeet Andre, or even my brother, and I’d still stick with the journals, though pretend to waiver slightly. My journals will exist forever, like Sylvia Plath’s, my naive ambitious younger self believed!
I don’t read them though, it is too weird, it is almost like time traveling, and I end up feeling embarrassed—something I don’t really feel that often—for my former self. When I have read them, I vacillate constantly between feeling like the author is me and feeling like the author is a stranger. I cringe at some of my immature actions and thoughts. I die a thousand deaths.
I always imagine a future daughter or grandchild of mine reading them. So vain of me, right? I think this because I would have loved reading the journals of the matriarchy in my own family. I feel like it could have been a right of passage had my mother handed over to me her 9th through 10th grade journal, say, as I was about to enter high school. Maybe it would have made my transition to high school better, to learn what she hated about it too. Maybe I could have appreciated her opinion more, or connected with her better. Maybe we could have spent a lot less time screaming at each other.
What I think is important in sharing journals is doing so at the right time, which makes me question this journal and my awful Deadjournal lost in cyberspace. Any future person in my life can read this anytime they want. I don’t think I write anything terribly personal or significant on here—it is definitely not a diary in the sense that my hard copy journals—but will I feel that way in three, five, ten years from now?
Online blogs and journals seem so ephemeral, but that is an illusion. It is the hard copies that face destruction. It is those that will fade and fall apart over time. The Internet is more durable and lasting. Does that make our online identities, with all their falseness and self-shaping, more important? When people die, their social networking sites live in creepy immortality. Years from now, when my generation dies, there will be an entire generation of dead people online. We will be one another’s top eight and be in the middle of pedestrian wall-to-wall conversations with each other eternally. Will curious descendants analyze their grandfather’s profile and go back pages and pages of comments to see a hint of another love of his life besides their grandma? I would do that.
I guess it doesn’t really matter. I believe the adage that you are only still alive until the last person who knew you—or learned from you—is dead.
Then, we are all stardust.
