Violet Voices

I Met Myself the Other Day

by Pattie

Vasthi’s post about finding her own journals reminded me of something I wrote last year. My writer’s group at the time loved it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it too!

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I met myself the other day.

My fourteen-year-old self, that is.

While preparing a seminar on the benefits of keeping a journal, I was reading my old high school journal notebooks. There are five of them, all Mead spiral notebooks such as I used for my schoolwork. The handwriting is round and loopy, the color of ink varies with mood, and the expressions embarrassingly dated.

I was surprised by fourteen-year-old Pattie. She had self-esteem issues, put entirely too much emphasis on boys, worried about her friends, and stressed about her hair. She spent a lot of time at church and wrestling out her faith on paper.

She was silly, she liked to have a good time, she loved her family. She was incredibly innocent. She wrote about her dreams for the future.

Want to know something? I have fulfilled many of her dreams. I have taught high school English. I am married and have two beautiful girls. It’s good to know that young Pattie would be happy to know this.

There are times at age thirty-five that I feel like I’m nowhere near as grown-up as I should be for the age I am. I still have self-esteem issues, I worry constantly about my friends, and I still hate bad hair days. But reading my own words from twenty-one years away sure makes me realize how much I have grown up and learned and changed.

28 March 2005

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This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Written By: Pattie
Posted under: Women's Voices .  Email This Post