Raw

I am pretty sure the point of keeping a journal of any kind is so that you can page back through to find the person that you had forgotten you once were. The one who sort of kind of obsessed about Dylan McKay's drinking problem, who kind of thought she might have a solution to it. Who by the way got her braces tightened and they HURT REAL BAD. Who doesn't know how to spell "evadently," evidently.

Lately I have gone back because I was forgetting who I was...and I have found someone with whom I was sorry I reacquainted myself. And it's hard to read certain things I wrote, so full of self-consciousness, maybe a little venomous, and really, so "evadently," without a clear purpose. Hungry for one, but snacking on air and Cheez-Its in the meantime....

And then there have been other moments recently when I had to go back and it was more productive.

Someone wrote awful things about me on the internet 3 years ago. That person apologized to me this week. The apology was on the internet. Perhaps it was poetic justice, perhaps it's a commentary on How We Deal These Days, but I was satisfied with the apology, and the whole experience says a little bit about me, too -- me now versus me then.

Because now, I don't have time to navel gaze (only as I write this...suddenly distracted by a ...OH HI, NAVEL), and I don't have time to care so much about what people who have no bearing on my life's decisions think about my life's decisions.

I have so many many good friends in my life right now, I feel pleased with how I treat my family, and God has just been revealing things in loud vivid living technicolor to me lately, and I am humbled.

Still.

There are people who will never care for me in the way I just keep super soaking them with love, who cannot be bothered to answer my collect call when I just used my last quarter to buy them a birthday card. I wish I could put on the stealth Nicole Richie shades over my whole person, and hang a tag on the doorknob to my heart: Can't Be Bothered.

But I don't want to be numb. I want to be a caring person. I think that is why I continue to journal. To remind myself of the things that used to trifle me, and to see how I somehow stopped caring about it all between then and now, and how, after it all went down, I still had a pulse.