I Kept a Diary & Other Foolish Moves

I'm a guarded person. I don't volunteer information. I need someone to ask me pointed, direct questions if they want answers.

Part of this is because I sometimes I don't really understand my own thoughts or emotions. (Do we ever really?) School struggles get mixed up with financial worries. Friends, family and boy problems all seems related. I'm sad because a cat I love died, but it's not until I find out how many hundreds of dollars I owe in Federal taxes that I start to cry. I think this is called "being a girl." I'm sure I'm not unique. Except I don't spill my emotional word vomit on everyone. I listen to your word vomit. Then I nod and sigh and wait for you to ask about how I am. If you don't, the discussion is over.

I hate being teased. As a middle child and the youngest of all my friends I live in fear of being seen as juvenile, or disrespected for having "lesser" problems. As I get older the age gap between me and those people I am closest to widens. As a girl, my friends were two to three years older. Now some of my closest companions are 28, 34, older even. I wasn't born guarded and I wasn't bored afraid of being teased.

***

I used to keep a diary. Lately I have stopped. I went through a rough, confusing eight months. This month has just begun to feel ok. I stopped writing in my diary because I started to lie in it. I started to lie because I was afraid to write the truth. I was afraid to write the truth because.......

When I was twelve I visited my best friend in the Pennsylvania. My whole family would go on yearly trips to visit her whole family. We all squeezed in together, did our schoolwork together, played together, did chores together. In general, these trips are some of my fondest childhood memories. A naive young me, misjudging the maturity of her friend and sister, brought a Composition notebook along with her. That notebook was my diary. The overwrought diary of a twelve year old. I mean, I said some insane stuff in there. There was, however, a level of respect I assumed my sister and friend had for me. I would never read their diary. They would not read mine.

Wrong. So damn wrong.

They read it. The whole thing. I had one of those little-girl crushes on a fictional character. I was relatively lonely at that time and suffered from an overactive imagination. I wrote about this crush in my diary. Which my best friend and sister read. I previously trusted the two of them with my life. I looked up to them like they were the sun and the moon. But they read my diary, and my naive little world came crashing down.

I think that was the first time I understood the concept of being unintentionally cruel. My sister and my best friend did not just read my diary. They talked about it nonstop. They teased me mercilessly. For years things I wrote in there would come up as the butt of a joke. I didn't cry or, looking back, let on how humiliated I was. Inside though, it was one of the worst feelings I've ever had. I felt betrayed, mocked, disrespected, unwanted, and unworthy.

I've spent the last eight years trying to fix that feeling. I will never forgive them for what they did. I never quite trusted them again the same way. (Side note: I love them both, still. Forever. Just, you know. With a grain of salt.) But I learned to be guarded. If I could be teased so much for a little-girl crush on a fictional character when I was twelve, what could I expect when the stakes got higher?  I hold my cards closer to my chest.

***

Even right now, I'm going through something similar. When my secrets wriggle themselves out of me, panic sets in. It doesn't matter if you're trying to help me. It doesn't who you are or how nice you are. I'm convinced I'm going to be teased.

***

I'm twenty. (Almost twenty-one, shut up.) I get defensive about my age. I try to prove myself. In jest, people I love are often unintentionally cruel to me. It usually has to do with my age, my position in life. Little things about "not understanding" something. Little jokes about me being "too young to remember" whatever they're talking about. I'm sick of being called cute. I don't want to be adorable. It feels like a weakness. No one is trying to hurt me, but it hurts. Yet I know I am also unintentionally cruel to others. God, I just was, barely a week ago. It's something we all do. It's one of the most depressing, gross ways to hurt someone. It's so hard to apologize for. No one wants their problems to be mitigated. No one wants their heart to be stepped on. So yes, I'm guarded. It's something I constantly carry in me, but I don't think it necessarily defines me. It only shows sometimes, when things get awkward. When I feel set upon. I get quiet when I'm afraid of being teased.

I learned through that experience that sometimes your friends are your worst enemies. I guess I also learned to stop writing my embarrassing moments down in ink where it can be found and read by anyone; to keep my mouth shut sometimes. And I learned that unintentional cruelty is the worst. It can't be battled. If someone doesn't realize what they're doing to you, they're not going to stop. They don't understand. I can cry and complain for the next twenty years, but my sister and friend will never exactly understand what they did that day. I don't think I've ever even gotten a formal apology for it. Actually, more than that, my sister still teases me about... basically everything in my life.

To be honest though, I'm probably safer not writing about my dramatic love life with a fictional character in a notebook. I wish my twelve year old self had had more discretion. So it's not all bad. I learned that there are somethings no one else ever will understand. So just... those things can be kept to yourself. Or at least, held onto till the right moment.