Notes from my high school self

I was looking for my high school story notebook, and found my high school journal instead. This is from a rare typewritten page among the mostly handwritten ones:

“When I’m a serious writer, I plan to have a typewriter set up in my room all the time.”

Okay, yeah, so the future didn’t turn out quite the way I imagined.

“Right now, it [the typewriter] kind of gets in the way … it is hard to make corrections on a typewriter. In a strange way, it takes less effort to type.”

That girl-I-was wasn’t even sure what a word processor was, but she was so ready for one.

“That’s what I need to do–write a really good poem. I still can’t get all the connections among everything in the universe down on paper.”

I admire my younger self so much. She was trying, really trying, to figure everything out, and believed that if she kept at it, she’d get there eventually. She’s still working on it, of course, but I like to think she’d mostly be okay with that. And there there’s this, written a few years later, by my college-self rather than my high school one, right around the time I was getting up the nerve to write seriously:

“Writing is what I care about most in the world. I may not be brilliant; but my style has some merit; at the very least I am capable of fashioning coherent, unawkward sentences. As I scientist I could not be happy unless I succeeded. I care enough about writing and literature that I can fail and be happy.”

My younger self, she really did know what she was doing, more often than not. I owe her so much. Especially I owe her for this:

“I want to read, to learn of other people’s inner worlds. And I want to write. I’m going to go for it, because if I don’t take chances now … I’ll always wonder what could have been.”