May 20, 2022

Time Machine

We’re in the midst of re-doing our children’s bedroom, which was last painted in 2008, before we even had children, and the new bunk bed has no clearance underneath, which has required a lot of reorganizing, because all their out-of-season clothes had been stored in plastic bins beneath the old bed. And in the midst of the re-storing, I switched the contents of another plastic bin I had into a cardboard box, and found myself going through my diaries.

I kept diaries for years, though then there came a moment about 15 years ago when I got rid of a lot of them, culling them along with my stacks of photos, yearbooks, scrapbooks. All of it just too much to keep, to carry, in a practical sense, as well as a spiritual one, and there are benefits to not having a basement, a place for boxes of this stuff to live forever,

The past is also on my mind because next week is the 20th anniversary of my university graduation, and I’ve been charged with putting together a photo slideshow for our virtual event. And I’m also currently at work on the early chapters of my next novel, many of which are drawn from life, taking place about 19-20 years ago.

And so it was something to discover this specific diary, which I didn’t even know existed. (I had forgotten too just how detailed my entries were—I wrote so much and so often!). This one runs October 2002-May 2003, capturing the beginning of my relationship with my husband, the months I spent living in a backpackers hostel, working as a temp—initially charged with entering the details of thousands of years-old time sheets into a computer system, the most mindless, boring, pointless occupation imaginable.

And I write about this in my novel, a whole scene in which my character goes to the agency and BEGS for a different job, because she’s going insane from the monotony, and what a thing to find it all outlined in my diary—it really happened. And so much more, I was definitely a ridiculous person, young and unformed, but I was also so brave and strong and resilient, and I am so proud of that young woman who these writing gives me such a direct connection to.

There’s so much incredible writing outlining experiences and emotions I no longer have any recollection of. I’d had an abortion only months before all this, and so that whole experience was very much in process as I was writing. Twenty years later, I’ve made sense of it all, fashioned my own narrative, but it was so raw then, and I didn’t know where I was going, what my story might turn out to be.

In October 2002, I went on a date to the movies with someone I’d met, which was fun and exhilarating, and I wrote in my diary afterwards, “If there is anything I’m sure of not wanting in my life right now, it’s a baby.” What had happened to me, I determined, was “sad and beautiful.” Beautiful, because now I got to have my life.

And then later on the following March, reflecting on the one-year anniversaries of so many pivotal things, and the reality that I could have had a baby then in an alternative reality, an impossible reality. What surprised me about these entries was that *I was so angry* about what I’d been through—and not the abortion, because the abortion had ended the terribleness, though it wasn’t a picnic either.

I wrote: “I don’t regret, but I hate. So full of rage that it ever had to happen at all, that I ever felt so much pain. I am past it now but time’s parallels bring it back to me and it’s so unbearable I cannot bear it. It could drive me crazy to be back there again… I remember grieving in the Fall but I am so absolutely angry now. I broke down…but we’re going to Paris, where I should have gone last July. I am arriving late from a different direction…”

I have no recollection of feeling any of that. Those feelings especially visceral and striking in light on threats to abortion access, something that never even occurred to me in 2002 (when we were all post-feminist, ha ha, remember that?). To have ever been that desperate and not had a way out. What an unimaginable cruelty.

So grateful to this little notebook for a reminder of the person I used to be.