As It Was Written

Addie and Stuart dragged down a box of my old journals this week. "No, please don't read those," I requested as I threw my body between them and the books. It's not that I had such a salacious and scandalous younger life that I can't let them read about it. It's that I'd rather they know me now, not as I was fourteen, sixteen, twenty years ago.

Still, I couldn't resist reliving the past a little myself. I picked up a journal from 1996, when I was nineteen. The first thing I noticed was that I had overdosed on Jane Austen. My whole journal was written in Austenese. For instance, when writing about how my family rearranged major appliances in the house, did I write, "And then we put the big freezer where the old fridge had been."? No. I wrote, "And then the freezer took the spot recently vacated by the other appliances." The whole darn journal reads like that.

Also, I didn't use words like "darn." Even in my journal, I was insufferably moralistic. At one point, I wrote about how my two sisters and I walked through the woods pretending to be three kids in a horror movie talking about "Crazy Joe" who had a bloody shovel. (Acting out spontaneous scenes was an everyday pastime for us. We called ourselves the Three Weird Sisters.) I ended the description with an apology that "Admittedly, this little game was hardly edifying; but we like to be clever, and don't always choose our subjects well." Doesn't that make you want to beat your head against a wall? Or beat my head against a wall?

There are some fun parts, though. Like the afternoon of a birthday party when I realized I didn't have a gift. I thought a journal-book would be a perfect gift, and it so happened that my sister, Rose, had a blank one. So she sold it to me. Yes, that's right -- she made me PAY her for it. But she did give me a discount because I'd bought her ice cream earlier that day.

Here's an actual excerpt from the journal:

April 10, 1996
After a lapse of three complete days, one might expect that I have much to write. One would be mistaken Uneventful and very quiet, I haven't even any tales about the friends we paid a visit to yesterday. So I say; but let me begin writing down the days' events, and it all shall flood back. I will stem the tide, though: it is 9:30 and I am sleepy, since I actually got up on time."

Please note that this is just the introduction to the day's entry. I wrote like that every day. There are six books for this year, all written in the same style. My 33-year-old self is fantasizing about traveling back in time and attacking my 19-year-old self with a red pen.

The most exciting event, journalwise, was when my sister-in-law, Jessica, called to say a youth leader at their church was interested in getting to know me. (I hadn't met him: Jessica was playing matchmaker.) My family abided by the rules of Courtship as laid down by Bill Gothard, which said that such a request had to be taken really seriously. The only way a guy could "get to know me" was if he had marriage as his intention. Furthermore, I wasn't the one to tell him this: it was my stepfather's job.

Of course, Guy went with what I wanted to do. While I wouldn't have minded writing to a young man, I certainly didn't want to court him, and there was no middle ground. So Guy said no, and that was the end of it. Obviously not much happened, but I certainly got mileage out of it in my journal. (In retrospect, it was the right decision; but the poor guy must have been very confused by the whole rigamarole.)

Reading through the journal now, the parts that stand out to me are the few sentences where I mentioned applying for an internship at HSLDA. Back then I was more interested in the two-week desktop publishing course I took at ATI's Indianapolis Training Center. I thought my future was in ATI. I didn't realize that the internship was actually the gateway to the rest of my life. The internship was when I began to change the way I thought, the way I saw God, and of course when I met my future husband. While I had a grand time at the publishing course and actually did use the skills I learned, it was one of the last ATI events I attended.

My journals at this time included almost no reference to my own romantic feelings. Romance wasn't an approved activity in ATI, and therefore not in my journals. In the hundreds of words I wrote about my desktop publishing class, I completely neglected to mention I developed a crush on one of my classmates.

I still remember him, though: he was calm, a little shy, but when he did speak it was something interesting or funny. I met someone a lot like him a few months later at HSLDA. And I married that one. Now that's worth writing about.

-- SJ