reminiscing (and procrastinating)

Well I have been procrastinating writing an essay all afternoon, and continue to do so, but when I finish typing this all my attention is focused on the hypocrisy of Jefferson and the contradiction of his philosophies. Oh, man, that's what I LOVE spending my Sundays thinking about. Well, to give it justice, it is more interesting than a few of our essay topics have been.

Anyway, I decided randomly today to get my journals all organized chronologically in one place so they weren't scattered all over my room. I have 27 and a half notebooks of varying sizes filled up with words, mostly from the past five years, although one of them is my sporadically kept journal from age five on (the earliest entries consist mainly of: tuday was gud I got to ply with Crig, Crig being my brother Craig). Needless to say, I got distracted on the earlier ones. I wanted to pinpoint exactly where the bipolar became obvious. It was mainly in my journal from the summer before seventh grade, and seventh grade. I had a lovely manic summer during which I was excessively happy and didn't sleep, writing a journey full of shallow things like, man I'm glad I'm finally popular because that's all that matters in life, but my first journal from seventh grade I was suicidal and very angry at my mother and writing all of these philosophical journal entries about the meaning of life, despairing that I had ever cared about something as trivial as being popular. During seventh grade I left all my popular friends, not caring about popularity anymore, to make the friends I still have today, mainly kids with 4.0GPA's who in middle school didn't swear (they all do but me now basically), and still don't drink or do drugs. The friends I had during sixth grade are now pregnant or in jail or the like (well, not all of them are that extreme, but they are very different from me).

I thought it was really interesting that I could point, down to essentially a few months, to the time when I first began to notice my bipolar. I had been bipolar since I was probably about seven, which is when my parents and counselor say they remember it starting, but I was sort of oblivious to it until I was 12. It is weird to read in my journal my confusions about how I felt like I had "two different people" inside of me and the like (oh, joy, the irony of looking back knowing that although I was talking about bipolar there, a year and a half later the DID would come, making my realize I had more than just two people within me).

I am SO SO glad I kept journals throughout middle and high school. They help me a lot when I'm writing in them, to organize my thoughts, and they help me looking back to make connections about changes that occurred inside me.

On another tangent, man I was an amazing writer when I was eleven, no matter how shallow I was.

I also found this book I wrote in seventh grade that I totally forgot about, and am shocked to realize it's probably better than a lot of what I'm writing now.