a year ahead of a year ago

Have you ever picked up a diary or journal that you wrote a year, two years, or even three years ago? Boy is it interesting! A little less than two hours ago, I stumbled upon a journal I kept from a little over a year ago. I just read through every entry before writing this blog, and I can’t help but notice how much and how little I have changed in the course of a year. Reading through each entry was even more surprising and interesting than the entry before it. I didn't read my own journal because it was well written, heck, it couldn't have been any less grammatically or punctually correct. I read it because it was my life one year ago. Where were you one year ago? I can tell you exactly where I was. I was crazy about the girl I am still crazy about now. I was surprised with how easy my senior year was starting off. I was making a promise to myself to keep my notes neat and clean (a promise I would habitually and unknowingly break throughout the year). And I was looking forward to the senior play Arsenic and Old Lace. That's what was going on in my life. Where were you? What were you doing? What were you thinking?

I found that reading the journal of my past year was, putting it lightly, extremely interesting and insightful. It was interesting because I was reading my thoughts exactly a year ago. I read everything I was going through, and everything I struggled with, and everything I overcame. It was insightful to me because, besides putting what happened day by day in each entry, I put how I felt about what happened during that day. I was upset a couple nights, on cloud nine sometimes, and even depressed on other days. I can literally see the ups and downs of my last year like a scatter-plot graph, going up and going down.

Looking back, I am glad I kept a journal. If not for the sake of venting, which reading some of my entries I did quite often, then for the sake of being able to read it exactly a year later and say, “I got over that, and it wasn’t even important to begin with.”

"Boy, how this past year was so interesting." I get the feeling I'm going to be saying that again a year from now.