Notes from 2010: July 8, 1998.

If possible (and it may not be), please try to see past the weird, bombastic language I liked to used in my journals at this stage in my life. I like to think that, twelve years down the road, I've mostly managed to curb that impulse. (Though, as you'll probably notice, I haven't done so well with my impulse to write huge, run-on sentences. Or have too many parenthetical statements.) But as I say in my intro post, I'm trying to keep these entries pretty unedited, and as head-shaking as this kind of writing is to me now, it's who I was then. It does make me wonder how I ever deluded myself into believing I wasn't really a nerd...

This entry is from the summer between tenth and eleventh grades, about the time when my problems really started. My group of junior high friends was pretty fractured by now, and it was starting to sink in that things were never going to go back the way they used to be. And, being extremely shy, I had no idea how to go about meeting new friends, in school or elsewhere. I had also started cutting in the latter half of tenth grade, as a fucked-up way to help myself deal with the hurt, which speaks to where my head was at that time. These are the seeds that the next two years grew from. "I'm utterly alone": those words, written for the first time here, became my mantra.

(...and for all that I meant that when I wrote it, in retrospect, I do have to own to echoes of Olivia from Beetle Juice. I always did love that movie...)