Reflection on Days Long Gone: I Used to Write Letters to Myself
Journaling — or keeping a diary, as some might call it — takes on many forms for different people.
Personally, I started "formally" keeping one when I was about 12 going on 13, right after we moved from Denmark to the south of Spain. I always enjoyed writing letters even when I was a kid, but I think there was more to my keeping a journal than just that: I had basically been uprooted from my life in Denmark and set down in this strange land where I know nobody... and had nobody to talk to.
You're perhaps familiar with the idea of people writing "Dear Diary" at the start of their journal entries... in the case of my youthful self, it was more a case of writing "letters" to myself, or perhaps the version of myself that might have existed, had I continued a more normal path into adolescence, back in our old neighborhood in Denmark.
Whereas I suppose it goes with the territory of being a teenager to be "angsty," were mostly the story of feeling horrendously out of place in an environment of primarily retired expats... where other people my age were almost unheard of and even though we were living in a "foreign country," we actually lived inside a secluded bubble that bore very little resemblance to actual SPAIN.
So I wrote daily "letters" to my alternate reality self, trying my best to describe my daily doings as one might do to someone who'd be severely challenged to even grasp what such a life was like.
Sadly, I don't have those journals any more... I burned them when I was about 17 and discovered not only that my mother had been reading them, but then she insisted on trying to "adjust my reality" by berating me and repeatedly stating that everything I had written (and was writing) was "nonsense."
In retrospect, it wasn't nonsense... but my mother would stand for no challenge to her own perception of living the perfect life among the retired rich (and bored!).
But this post isn't about those long gone days, but about how they substantially were responsible for developing my love of writing, and of "exploring thoughts and concepts," and simply being a keen observer — and student — of of human beings and their many quirks, phobias, foibles and addictions.
I would sit in my little north-facing room, my window mostly blocked by a very large palm tree... and spend a lot of time exploring the deeper meanings of why older adults did what they did... mixed with exploring the fertile imagination of my own growing mind. My inner world was rich with imaginary landscapes that mostly weren't even on this planet.
These strange things all found a "voice" through my writing.
Around my 15th birthday, the "letters to myself" gradually gave way to my endeavor to document "this History of the Known Universe," a mega project that ended up filling 12 or 13 360-page journals with tiny meticulous writing describing hundreds of inhabited planets across many galaxies where thousands intelligent species of beings lived more or less in harmony.
Oddly enough, all that writing was not inspired by reading science fiction... I didn't really get into science fiction till I was a couple of years in, so it was more like my writing inspired me to read science fiction. Unfortunately, many of those journals perished in "the burn," and the rest were lost during a move where some storage boxes accidentally got left in an attic, and were never recovered.
This fragment of memories came to the surface today because I was sorting another old box from my closet, and I came across some actual snail mail letters from family, written around the same time.
Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!
How about YOU? Are you a life-long journal keeper? Or is this Hive blogging experience your first attempt at such a thing? If you DO keep journals, do you still have your earliest ones? Do you ever read them... and, if so, what do you learn about yourself? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220119 23:20 PST
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