Sunday, January 21, 2007 | by nathan

I Just Don’t Want Coffee

Can you believe it? I’m getting one of the things on my Uberlist done today - I’m reorganizing the closet in my office. This is a work of major scope, as there is a bunch of crap in my office closet, a lot of it boxes of things to which I am too attached to trash, such as concert tickets, a bottle of Ale 8 One that Woody and I got on one of our trips to his parents’ farm in Kentucky, letters from friends as far back as high school.

The best thing I’ve found are all my old journals, poetry books, and photo albums from high school and college. I flip through them and can.NOT.BELIEVE I was once this person. I can’t believe that as early as 10th grade I was writing about having crushes on boys and decorating my journal pages with ink stamps. I mean, Jesus. I can’t believe how much I used to cling to people who made me feel like shit about myself, or that I wrote one or two lines that I read now and think, "You know, it sucks balls, but for a fifteen year old it doesn’t suck as bad as it could."

I am nonplussed to think how much I’ve changed in the last ten, fifteen - shit, the last three years. Reading back through all the words of the people I’ve been - it’s weird. I find myself mourning some friendships that went sour, or faded quietly, or that I finally wised up and got out of. I find myself wondering where those people are now. Some, I know, and I wish I didn’t. Others, I’d give anything to sit with them for an hour.

What I wouldn’t do is go back to any days past. Sitting on my floor is a pile of cardboard, paper, gold leaf, leather and upholstery that tells the story of where I’ve been. I had a moment where I was terrified and told Brian he should burn all these if I die, but then I thought, "I’m going to be dead. Who cares?" So I told him not to publish them. He pointed out that, if I die a famous author, those journals could be a valued literary relic.

Oh, yeah, okay, well, then you can publish them.

In the meantime, I’m giving serious consideration to finding some particularly damning passages and submitting them to The Cringe Book, which is a collection that Sarah Brown is putting together of teenage journal entries. Here’s what Sarah herself has to say about it:

We’re looking for brave souls willing to share their old diaries, journals, letters, notes, songs, poems… anything you wrote during the crushing misery of adolescence and then saved in a hidden box at your parents’ house all these years. Top secret no more.

The more dramatic, embarrassing or excruciating the writing, the better. A good test to determine whether or not your material is Cringe-worthy: when you read it to yourself, do you physically cringe? Then for the love of god, it needs to be in this book. Seriously. You are going to be so glad you did this. Cheaper and better than therapy.

I might regret doing it, but in the midst of this cleaning-out, it might be good. I find myself mourning the person I was a bit. Not that I would change anything about him, because I think that what he (I) went through got me here, which is exactly where I want to be. But also, I got hurt along the way - everyone does - and I think a part of that hurt always stays with you. I’m starting to think it’s something about trying to heal as much as you can, and to not let the hurt make you afraid, or mean.

So, yeah, there’s a bit of sadness in looking back over all this stuff, from when I was 11 and getting bullied at school, to high school, where, oddly, I was basically happy if not incredibly lame and clingy. The journals follow me to North Carolina, to Ireland and Italy, to Connecticut and back here, through all those years of pain and long, drunken nights, and I would not trade one damn word of any of it, which also hurts like hell. The thing is, the story is mine, it belongs to me. I’m luckier than most in that I can pile my story up on the floor, or, in this case, arrange it neatly in my closet, where it can sit, reminding me where I’ve been and maybe point a little of the way to where I’m going.

So, maybe, if I die, you should all sit around with my ashes on the coffee table and laugh your asses off that, in the ninth grade, I was feeling particularly angsty and copied the lyrics to "We Don’t Need Another Hero" into my journal. For some reason. 

Still - that’s miles away from the most cringe-worthy thing in there.