Recently I moved from a large house to a tiny apartment, and in the
process of culling my stuff, I came across a stack of high school
diaries. As a teenager with very few friends and a serious amount of
‘alone time’, diaries were a lifeline. I bought new ones every couple
of months and filled them front to back with rambling stories about
my feelings. I don’t know why I find it so surprising, but it turns out
teenage Sam was pretty full of angst.
Part of the horror of finding your old journals is that they tell a
really specific, one-sided version of your adolescence. In one that
I assume came from the early puberty period – judging by the words
“EMINEM ROX” scribbled on the back – I went on and on about
my “fkn unreasonable” parents and my “straight-haired” sister.
Twelve-year-old Sam lived in a frizzy-haired nightmare, and
‘straight-haired’ was not a compliment unless you thought it was
cool to be ‘popular’, which apparently I did not. There’s a new kind
of empathy you develop for your family when you’re reading cruel
appraisals of their appearance, and page after page about the
tantrum you threw when they wouldn’t let you take a 40-minute
shower in drought-stricken South Australia. But it’s also funny to
find out that the actual former you (a 13-year-old who thought
J-Lo was “sweet as”) is not at all the person you remembered.
Alongside long rants about sibling injustice, the music I “hearted”
and the results of my Saturday morning hockey games (our teamusually lost), I filled my diaries with someverydetailed descriptions
of adolescent longing. Some of them take the form of graphic
and anatomically absurd drawings that make me wonder whether
I’d ever seen two people interacting, let alone kissing. If aliens
arrived on Earth and found our teenage diaries, they’d totally
believe that human lips protrude 10 metres from our faces when
we make out. Other parts of the diary are less graphic and more
depressing, especially as a person who didn’t realise they were gay
until their mid-20s. “I wish SO HARD that Mrs Jones was my big
sister,” one entry reads. “She makes me feel warm and weird, like,
special.” Another entry about soft, soft lady arms lasts for almost
five pages, then trails off into another very serious teenage concern:
“Mum won’t let me take her tuna cans for lunch cos she is SO
SELF*SH.” (Star in place of the ‘I’, because you wouldn’t want
your mum to findit and understand.)
It’s really easy to assume, from the point of your mid-to-late 20s,
that you’re basically a teenager anyway. Sometimes my bank
account has just enough money to pay my rent, and Istillchoose to
buy beer. But two seconds with these diaries is enough to remind
me how far I am from the codes of teenage-hood, partly because
those diaries are sometimes literally unreadable. Who knows what
HHLOL means, but it’s a term I used a lot, and I can only assume is
a version of ‘laugh out loud’ specific to either my high school or my
brain. It’s possible we all feel misunderstood during adolescence
because teenagers are simply impossible to understand. Even when
I ‘get’ what little Sam was talking about, the concerns are often
foreign. “Just wait,” I silent-whisper at my younger self while I listen
to her complain about t-shirts that don’t cover her midriff, “there’s
so much more to come.”
Reading adolescent diaries is like watching really weird home videos,
but instead of your family on vacation or at Grandma’s 70th, you’re
watching yourself, as a teenager, alone in your bedroom, wondering
whether it’s finally time to throw out your collection of Barbies.
Diaries are just pages of mundane life details, so familiar, foreign and
embarrassing that they’re now interesting.dear diary
SAM PRENDERGAST GETS TO KNOW
HER HORMONAL, FRIZZY-HAIRED
FORMER SELF.
PhotoJana Martiškovásomething to say