Time Travel

Aren't we always a little bit who we were?

Memory is a tricky thing. You tell yourself a story that goes like: This. You think you know What happened and When and How.

Then you read your old journals and realize you’ve been remembering it wrong all these years. Or you’ve forgotten some of the most important details, the ones that shift the entire mood of the memory. It was worse than you thought, or better. It was sunny that day, not raining. It was you who broke it off, not him.

I was a prolific journal keeper from age 18 to 25, and kept the habit going on-and-off into my adult life. I discovered One Line a Day journals about fifteen years ago, so now my journaling is a quick sentence about my day instead of page after handwritten page recounting every thought and conversation and every feeling about those thoughts and conversations.

Turns out my overwrought youthful confessions are coming in handy. I’ve been scraping the pages of my old journals for evidence of who I used to be — research for a work-in-progress — and I’ve been amazed at the diligence with which I chronicled my coming of age. Before I had the internet or daily access to a computer, I’d stay up late into the night pouring my joys and fears onto the pages of a blankbook. I favored the hardcovers by Longmeadow Press with their ornate gold foil covers, perfect binding, and buttery lined pages.

I haven’t read any of these pages since I wrote them. That’s 35 years, for the oldest entries.

It is quite something to exist in the same moment as one of your old selves. Your past and present inhabiting the same space, breathing the same air.

It was hard not to cringe, at first. Hard not to espouse that old maxim about youth being wasted. Hard not to think how ridiculous were my ideas, how outsized my feelings, how naïve, how stupid, how embarrassing my behavior.

But after giving nearly ten years of my selves a read the past few weeks, I’m not cringing anymore. I’m feeling very tender.

That girl, she hadn’t ever felt those feelings before and didn’t know what to do with them. Everything was so total, so all-consuming. First serious crush, first date, first boyfriend, first kiss, first love, first awful and annihilating heartbreak. She was flailing and floundering through much of it. Making mistakes, making herself a fool. But she was also figuring it out. And writing it all down was a big part of that growth.

This is what I wrote in the middle of a muddle at age nineteen:
Paper and pen. The key to a world where I am safe. A world where I can say whatever I want. A world where I am free to dream. Free to pretend. Free to release the pain and frustration that I have packed into my soul. When I write and I see my feelings become tangible tracks on paper, I begin to understand myself. Well, usually. Sometimes I just confuse myself. Sometimes when I write, I say things that are true that I don’t even want to admit are true…

There was one particular journal, one of the early ones that I wrote when I was 18. It spans six months, from the spring semester of my sophomore college year through the summer. In the beginning, as I was reading, I wanted to reach through the pages and give myself a good shake. “Oh my god!” I wanted to say, “Stop being such a psycho!”

By the time I reached the end of that journal though, I could see the me that was beginning to make sense of things. I was cheering her on. And she was talking back to me:
I’m sure one day I will look back on these pages and think how incredibly juvenile and foolish I was, I wrote. I don’t know everything and I am aware of that fact. I’m honestly trying to make the best decisions I can at the time.

Sometimes Marido and I talk about things we could have done differently in our twenties. Doors we could have opened, or doors we wish we hadn’t. But: In order to change those choices, we would have had to be completely different people. And opening those doors we never opened would have spun us off on entirely different trajectories. We would not now be who we are.

We were, as my young self said, trying to make the best decisions we could at the time.

Quite often, I think it’s a shame that our human lives are so short. A quick shake of decades and we’re done. We’re out. If we’re lucky, we get wise as we get older, but often it’s too late to erase or even repair our biggest mistakes.

Though I don’t have many regrets, the handful I do carry with me are heavy. I daydream a version of reincarnation in which I get to begin again, but keep the brain I have now, retain the person I’ve spent my life becoming. To be a 19-year-old who recalls her previous life. Who feels those big feelings but knows how to handle them this time around.

Then again, she didn’t really do so badly, that young LaDonna. And I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her and her mistakes. And her journals.

In the pages of one that I kept during a long and drawn-out heartbreak my junior year of college, I attempted to write a (truly terrible) poem about how I was feeling. The poem is so terrible I won’t repeat it here, but I will tell you what I wrote just below it:
A note to my older, wiser self: Don’t you dare laugh at this little poem or whatever it is. At least I had enough imagination to try. If you don’t like it, why don’t you go ahead and rewrite it!

I love that my young self knew that I’d return to her someday. That I’d read her, remember her. I love that she was trying. That she was writing. I love that she never stopped.

I think she already knew writing was the thing that would save us; the way we’d make sense of ourself and the world.

If she could see me today she’d be shocked, I think, about so many things. About how far we pushed the edges; how much we left behind.

But I think she’d be proud. I think she’d be dazzled.

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