journal

 The journal corrects many memories. For example, I have been convinced for many years that I watched Good Riddance live in London just after 9/11 happened. However, I could not find any record of a show in London. I pulled out my old journal from 2001 and, sure enough, I saw them in Portsmouth and not London. I also found the record of a conversations I had forgotten… significant ones filled with meaningful revelations… forgotten and buried deep in the past. I was quite shocked to read a passage in which I was talking about going out one evening in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with ‘Elizabeth.’ I could not recall, and still can’t, Elizabeth, although the more I think about it, the more I have brief flashes of recollection about this mysterious lady. A discovery such as this results in digging even deeper into the diary and I am reading backwards into the past to understand more of what happened and how it came to be.

I’d written a passage about goals that I had set and how they had made me feel happier, that I wanted to complete a bachelor’s degree in English and to work in IT in England and then the USA at some point in the future. Now I sit here in the USA having achieved those goals, as well as a master’s degree in English, and it is quite remarkable.

I am grateful that I kept journals from so many significant periods of my life that I can now look back on and re-live moments, analyse my reactions to them, witness myself going through things that were so momentous at the time and are now simply insignificant fragments of the past and, in many cases, losses and ended relationships that turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. Reading old journals is scary at times, it makes one fear for one’s own mind… but it is also wonderful to see how much we have developed and changed.


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