What I wrote, what I know
A few lines I once scribbled in a diary, and what I see in them now.
“I can’t eat anything. Like an old person with a terminal disease.”
The intensity of this line still makes me smile, not because I’m laughing at you, but because you didn’t hold back—not in your feelings, not in your language, not in the way you documented the world as if every small ache was worth remembering. You were not only feeling things deeply, you were performing them on the page, for no one but yourself. Your creative honesty is something I’ve come to admire more and more. You weren’t trying to be elegant. You were trying to survive your own sensitivity, and in doing so, you gave it shape.
“Thank God not everything in life comes down to numbers.”
I think you knew this long before the world gave you permission to live as someone who favored beauty over logic, symbols over spreadsheets. You never pretended to be interested in what didn’t move you, and even at seventeen, you understood that life (at least the parts that matter) can’t be measured with precision. There is no formula for the first time your heart breaks, no data point that can explain how it feels to sit under a tree with someone who understands you. You weren’t just saying this. You were declaring the truth you already knew would protect you.
“I wish I knew when things would work out for me.”
I remember how you wrote this, almost like a whisper to yourself on the night before your birthday, hoping something would change. You didn’t ask for guarantees. You just wanted a reason to believe. I want you to know that some things did work out, though not always in the way you imagined. You didn’t end up in a castle, but you built a life filled with meaning, and you kept some of your tenderness through it all. You became someone you would be proud to know. You kept going. And that, in itself, was a kind of arrival.
“Everyone else seems so sure of what they’re doing. I feel like I’m just pretending.”
That feeling didn’t go away, not entirely, but I’ve learned to sit with it. What you didn’t know then is that most people are pretending too, some with more confidence, others with better scripts. The certainty you envied was often a performance, and your uncertainty was actually awareness. You were noticing things, absorbing everything around you, questioning yourself because you were awake, not behind.
“If I could disappear inside a song, I would.”
And you did, again and again. You found music that gave your feelings a place to rest, even when you didn’t understand the lyrics, even when no one else around you seemed to feel quite as much. You were making a home inside beauty, inside mystery. Enya gave you space in a world that often felt too sharp, too loud, too indifferent. I’m grateful you let yourself go there. I’m grateful you didn’t force yourself to be more realistic.
“They played Enya. I made sure of it.”
Of course you did. You ran for the student committee, not just to help organize graduation, but to ensure the music sounded like the inside of your heart. You convinced the priest, through a back-channel negotiation involving your grandmother, to let “Storms in Africa” echo through the church, as long as there were no lyrics. You made sure your imagination reached the speakers. You insisted that your world could include beauty, even when others didn’t see the point. You’ve always done that: shaped spaces to feel like you.
“I’m so tired of being good. I just want to be free.”
You wrote that one in the margins, as if it was a second thought. And maybe that’s why it landed when I found it again. You were already starting to see the cost of constant goodness: the way it required you to shrink, to monitor yourself, to stay small so that others could stay comfortable. But you also knew that something inside you didn’t want to live that way. You didn’t stop being kind, but you stopped equating kindness with silence. And little by little, you found your own version of freedom.
You didn’t have the full picture.
But you had the truth.
And you didn’t stop writing.
That’s how I found you again.
✶ This essay is part of From the Beginning, a personal series built from my diaries—one memory at a time. You’re reading the last post about 1998. Each piece revisits the girl I was, the world I came from, and the details I didn’t know I was already saving.