Journaling

When I was a kid, mostly in middle school, I started journaling. I was compulsive, disciplined, and insatiable. I literally wrote every day - as though I had a responsibility to capture my daily events. I wrote every day for years - capturing when I woke up, who I talked with on the school bus, who I had a crush on, what I thought about my parents. I had volumes upon volumes and kept up the routine through college (although not daily) and even into my first year teaching. And here we are, many, many...many years later - and they are still taking up space in a giant tub in my basement. I keep thinking one day I'll crack the lid and amble down memory lane. But the rest of me thinks what a horrible idea that would be. Do I really want to relive, reread, and rethink the ramblings of my 14-year-old self? Maybe those things I wrote needed to stay exactly where they were in time. I'd like to think they'd give me insight into who I have become - as a teacher, as a mother, as a poet. But really, I'll probably just be annoyed at my pretentious, precocious, presumptuous ideologies and chronicling of my teenage angst.