Reticulating Splines

A friend and I were recently having a conversation about keeping diaries/journals and he asked me whether I’d be more unsettled by my stories and unfinished ideas or my personal entries in the hands of a stranger. I didn’t have to think at all about an answer – when I was thirteen, I moved and misplaced one of the earliest journals I kept. It was a plain wide-ruled Mead composition book with each paged filled, front and back. It held lot of different things, but the bulk was split between prose fiction and personal narratives. My first foray into creative writing was with fan fiction (minus the gratuitous homo-erotica found in much of the genre)…I used characters from my favorite books, films and television shows and created new storylines for them. To this day, my weakest point is still character development, but when I was heavily into writing fan fiction, having preexisting characters helped me sort of gloss over that and jump straight into storytelling and writing scenes, which was a lot of fun. I had no siblings and not many kids lived in my neighborhood, so I’d spend all my free time entertaining myself with my imagination. Those were wedged in right next to more personal entries about what was happening in my life, how I felt about it, and a variety of preteen-level observations about the environment I lived in and people I encountered.

I had several journals, but this was my primary and longest running one and I’d left it behind in my old apartment. For a good couple years, I was extremely freaked out by the thought of the new tenants moving in there, discovering it and browsing through my inner-most thoughts. I lost sleep over it the first few months after the move. Eventually I moved on as my life continued and I filled up newer composition books (and eventually text documents and online blogs as well), but this question my friend posed to me got me thinking about it for the first time in several years. My answer was, without any doubt, my personal entries. It wasn’t the thought of perfect strangers reading my tales of adventure with John Connor or Fantastic Mr. Fox or Liu Kang that I found unsettling, it was all those entries I’d written about the awkward time I had maturing, about being a lonely only child gifted with crippling social anxiety and an array of phobias and neuroses, about first discovering attraction to the opposite sex and masturbation…that’s the stuff I lost sleep over. Though it bothers me less and less as more time comes between the present and that part of my life (more so because I’ve gone through many radical changes since and don’t even recognise the person I was two years ago let alone twenty), I’m curious about where exactly that journal wound up, if anyone read it and what they thought of it. I suppose it doesn’t matter a great deal, though if given a choice, I’d rather it be destroyed and never read by anyone but myself than have it back at the cost of someone being, in essence, privy to pieces of my soul from a former life. It is a former life after all, though no less my own.