donna: geez, that's crazy. my mom used to make us throw stuff out ever year.

me: a lot of it was school notebooks. but a lot was photos, too.
i kept almost all my notebooks from high school. for some reason i thought i would want them.

donna: we had a box of a certain size, and we could only keep what we could fit into our "treasure box".

me: that's a good idea.

donna: my mom hates clutter.

me: the funny thing is that if i had been throwing stuff away at the time, i wouldn't have known what would be valuable to me now.

me: for some reason going through this stuff makes me extremely depressed.
so eventually i just flipped through the notebooks for a moment and then tossed them in the trash.

donna: i think it would make me depressed too.

me: i was going to scan some old photos and stuff, but i'll have to wait until i can look at them again.
not that they were traumatic, it's just very strange.

donna: i hate thinking about what i thought my life would be like when i was young.

me: yeah, maybe that's it.

donna: i don't want to go back, exactly, although i wish i had some of the traits i seem to have lost.
i kinda wish for the clean slate. but maybe every moment is a clean slate.

me: i'm so excited about my life right now, but there's this horrible feeling i get with these memories.

me: i decided that our future selves have as much influence as our memories -- like our hopes and dreams and expectations -- so in a way we are all just as much a clean slate at any moment.
back then i had less memories but just as many expectations, so i was just as trapped. now my memories are more weighty but i have grown so much that my expectations are more realistic and less likely to bring me down.

donna: hmm...i think i will e-mail what you just wrote to myself. i like it.

me: i came up with that to try to make myself less depressed.

And to continue quoting myself, and because I am tired, here is something I wrote to Sky (I was responding to some things she'd written about when we were young):

i've been reading through my old journals -- in the same journal where i chronicle that trip in 7th grade, and making out with that guy, and everything, a few pages later i'm writing about working on my dollhouse!!! it's so freakin funny. i think one reason all my writing/art from back then is so stupid is that i was trying SO fucking hard to literally be 20, when i was really 12. damn, i hope in 10 years my writing and stuff from now does not totally repulse me like that stuff does.

as far as the part i quoted in my diary, i never had that feeling, that i was more into aesthetics or anything. at the time i felt all over the place, reaching for anything that would make me feel part of... part of something, i wasn't sure what, but i was going to try whatever i had to, to feel that.

i let myself be influenced by so many different books and bands and everything else. so much of it wasn't "me" at all, and i can see it so clearly now. i was such a follower. to people at our school i may have looked original but i was only trying to follow -- but following different people than they were. well, some of it was original. at least i had the guts to BE the weirdest fucking person, no matter what.