Life in Capital Letters

Dear Not so Dear Diary,

I’ve kept a diary - or “journal”, as non-sentimental and very adult folks like to call it - since I was around 13 years old. I had been writing even before that, writing short stories (meaning 3 pages) that I illustrated with crayons. No one had to encourage me to write; it was something I did to pass the time when my homework was done (or not), mom still at work, grandmother cooking dinner and sunset making outside play impossible. Looking back, I think it says a lot about my disposition, then and now, that I chose writing over other forms of entertainment.

By the time I was 15, I had begun exploring poetry - my grandmother wisely having given my angsty teenage self an Anthology of American Poetry that endeared me to the genre - and was hooked on writing more than ever before. I not only felt in control (a precious feeling to a teenager) but also powerful when I could take vast, raw emotions and whittle them into a smaller, more delicate form, a poem of perfectly chosen words. In high school, I started to share some of my writing with friends, who encouraged me endlessly. My junior year, we pressed the English faculty (the three of them at our small Catholic high school) to start a school literary magazine and to our surprise one teacher adopted the idea with gusto.

Only a few students volunteered to help gather and edit selections. Just as few were interested in submitting anything for publication. Our private school was filled with a mostly homogeneous group of privileged white children. Many of the boys did not really consider self-expression worth their while, but rather focused on using their new car or jetski to get girls and increase their sense of power and masculinity. The girls, so eager to express themselves through gossip, were focused on being beautiful and were already following the societal dictum to be vigilant of the unattractively emotional and needy hysteric which can ambush a woman and take over her body at any time. Self-expression, often being called indulgent and sentimental by those who like to keep their introspection as brief as a trip through a fast food drive-thru, is considered one thing that might trigger hysteria. Best to stay away.

So for the 5 or so volunteers who started the literary magazine, it was a reason to meet and talk about writing, but little more. Our teacher, Mrs. Braun - whose name and unshaven legs invited quite a bit of derision - seemed disappointed that she would not have the chance to publish numerous essays about her time in the Peace Corps in Africa. 

I kept writing, exploring the realms of essay and play, but always saving my best emotions for poetry. My English teachers gave me the senior award for English and encouraged me to study creative writing in college. Sadly, their advice ended there; no one could explain to me how my family would afford to send me to the colleges praised so highly by my teachers - “NYU!”, “Columbia!”, “No, Brown!” - without taking out more money in debt than the GDP of some small countries. 

Knowing what I know now (no degree earns you anything you wouldn’t have to work for anyway, but the knowledge is still worth more than gold) I should have gone ahead and taken that path. But I have no regrets. I stayed around in my gangrenous little hometown, I shared drinks, ideas, and kisses with some of the most interesting and sad people I’ve ever met (to this day), and I had a great love that impacted my life in profound ways. And the whole time I wrote about it.

Later when I finally made it to college, I met more sad and interesting people, learned from books and quiet observance all about the ways in which the world is so terribly fucked up, and became a recluse with good social skills. (“Sure, I can get you to be my friend, but what’s point when in a few years you’ll move on?”) And I wrote about it.

I wrote about how I was a lone wolf just trying to live by my ideals of life and love, and no one else was trying as hard as I to do that. I wrote about how bored I was with the status quo, but people being too stupid to change, why bother challenging it? I wrote about being a rebel through my art, art that no one understood, that no one would buy because they’re vapid (not that I ever tried to sell it). I wrote about wanting connections with people so desperately but feeling that it was pointless, for so many reasons, to start friendships - friendships with boys would only end in heartbreak because one of us would fall in love with the other, friendships with girls would only end in one of us ditching the other for a boy, friendship with anyone was pointless because it never lasts forever.

I was obsessed with the idea of forever. Not in a marriage sense, or in an eternal life sense. Call it forever in the sense of constancy. A friend who’d pick up the phone no matter what else they had going on. A lover who would love you without question, without hesitation, who would always chose you if the choice was to be made. I wanted those things because that’s what I felt I offered to others: an unwavering devotion that few people are capable of giving. Smothering devotion? I don’t know. I’ve always tried to give people the space to be who they are - if they weren’t who they are, why would I love them? - but expectations can be as smothering as demands.

So I hid in the shell of a tortured artist, writer, lover. I wrapped myself in misanthropy. It was easier to blame the world and our differences than to look at myself and question my own motives. (Was I really looking for undying love, or merely someone who would distract me from my shortcomings, someone who I could focus on to the exclusion of everything else? Was I devoted or was I devoid of a self?) I hid in my own vision of love, pain, disenfranchisement, and happiness too - these reflections were always focused inward. I became more and more self-involved, and like most who thrive on the act of creation, egotistical.

And so I’m writing about it. But not after thinking long and hard about my identity as a writer and how that fits in with who I want to be. And I’ve decided that I want to turn my focus outward, to get to the essence of Love, Pain, Happiness. I want to live my life in capital letters. When I write about my memories, I want to consider what the other people in those moments were feeling, to understand their side of the love, their contribution to me. How many emotional gifts have I received that I never acknowledged because they didn’t fit into my definition of love?

I don’t know if it will be possible to do this, to stop insisting upon everything my way, to see every piece of a life’s equation. But I want to try, even if it means killing the self-involved diarist in me.