2000-12-31 - 17:33:43
notes

How strange it is to find things that you wrote when you were younger. The other day I unearthed what I think was the last once still missing of my high school notebooks that had gone AWOL in the past couple years. I, like many people who like to scribble, have a tendency to buy notebooks, write in them for a little while (a few months seems to be the norm, sometimes longer if it's allegedly a real diary), set them aside, stop writing in them, and start a new notebook for no discernible reason. I did actually fill an entire notebook once, junior year I think, but it wasn't a terribly big one.

So *anyway,* I found this lovely thick 8"-by-5" sketchbook with poetry, drawings, and a couple journal entries dating from October '97 to January '98. There's a lot of stuff that I'd forgotten I'd written. Weird cartoons (including the first episode of The Adventures of Low Self-Esteem Girl, of which I drew I think two more strips that year), a rather interesting piecemeal chronicle of my love-life in late '97, a *lot* of poems (many of which appear to be intended as song lyrics), a few of which, like the first draft of a poem that eventually got published, are actually readable. It starts with a fake suicide note, which I remember writing but I don't remember why. I was often in a pretty bad state at that time, but I was never suicidal; I suspect the note was part of some piece of fiction I was working on and I just never wrote down the rest of it. Either that, or it was some self-prescribed therapy to get some of my worst feelings out of my system.

Of course, there is more than just time separating me from the person who wrote everything in that notebook. The spring of '98 was when I started getting treatment for my bipolar disorder, and experienced an amazing relief from the stifling depression that had caused me to hole up in my room, hate everybody, and write bad poetry for most of my adolescence up to that point. (The mania had a bit to do with my social problems, too, but it was the depression that was behind the bad poetry, y'see.)

So finding new stuff like this latest notebook is always a fascinating bit of time-travel. Whenever I read things I wrote before that time (and boy, did I write), it really is as though they were written by somebody else, even the things that I remembered writing and remembered the circumstances around once I read them. It's a capsule from another life. I don't want to lose any of the memory of what that time was like, and I'm glad I took such detailed notes.

Another entry before I leave this evening, I think. Couldn't finish the year without some kind of wrap-up. Just happened to have that regular entry to get out of the way first.

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