Learning from the past

Kind of a shame to post this right after a long-awaited post from Leah, but I've been wanting to say something about this for a few days now. Just kind of unsure of how to put it into words... I've never been good at writing, anyhow.

As I mentioned before, I've been packing up my things so I can ship them back to my parents' place in Phoenix. While I was going through the books I came across my old journals! I've been keeping a written journal since my senior year of high school. Anyway, I originally started the journals because I had a really hard time understanding my thoughts and emotions and also because I was really terrible at expressing myself.

So I started flipping through these journals and it was very interesting to see how much I've changed over the years. I never really think too much about how different I am, but it's totally apparent in my writing. Even the writing style is completely different. Not to mention the handwriting!! (it was really nice back then, and now it's chicken scratch, haha). What really shocked me is how it was totally obvious what was going to happen next. Like with my relationships, each entry would become progressively more angry/depressed until it ended with a breakup. And it would be so obvious to everyone around me, but I'd be stuck in denial or something. Ahh... well, I can't seem to explain this feeling too well. But everything really did happen in a pattern. And it made me wonder if I'm doing something wrong, if there's something I need to change to prevent that from happening. Even though I'm a different person now, does everything keep going in circles? It's really depressing to think about!

Even though it was pretty depressing, it was really amusing to read all of it. Also kind of embarrassing. There were times when I literally laughed out loud at some of the ridiculous crap I'd written in there. Also, I found it highly amusing that in my high school senior year alone I filled up like, three whole journals. Then there was a journal after that for my first year and a half or so of college. The journal I'm writing in now was started at the beginning of the year 2005! There was one year where I only wrote in it about three times! It was kind of sad to me, because my first relationship spanned like, 3 volumes. But my last relationship was only about 30 pages, even though we dated longer. I hardly wrote in that thing at all after I moved up here. So I've decided I really need to get back into writing in it more. I've been writing in it almost every night for the past few weeks in a mad attempt of completing the journal before I leave. It's pretty boring, though... It pretty much just says stuff like "I packed one (1) box today. Tomorrow I shall pack two (2) boxes." Such a big difference from those high school days when every trivial thing seemed so important and life-changing.

That was a long and boring rant about journals. But it's pretty awesome to go back and read about stuff you've completely forgotten about. DAMMIT I'M GETTING OLD.