From the Beginning: 1998
It all starts with this diary.
Golden angels on the cover. A year etched at the bottom: 1998.
I was seventeen. Finishing high school in a small town of 12,000 people. Working at an ice cream shop. Dreaming in English. Writing everything down with theatrical urgency: heartbreaks, poems, complaints, hopes. There was a lot of longing. And a lot of glitter gel pen.
I’ve decided to go through this entire diary and let it guide a series of reflections here on Substack.
Stories that are funny, intense, awkward, a little dramatic, and surprisingly wise.
Unrequited crushes. School elections. My obsession with Enya. Teenage angst. Library marathons. And the absolute panic of anything involving math.
Each post will be grounded in a memory, but also in what it reveals now, all these years later.
We’ll start with 1998.
The year of valedictorian speeches and braces. Of sleepy Catholic towns and disco parties. Of secret poems, dramatic metaphors, and a girl trying to figure out who she was.
I’m so glad you’re here.
✶ This essay is part of From the Beginning, a personal series built from my diaries—one memory at a time. You’re reading 1998. Each piece revisits the girl I was, the world I came from, and the details I didn’t know I was already saving.
