safe space

the endless stream of I shoulds

I found my childhood diary a few weeks ago, or to be precise, my mom found it in her attic and handed it over to me. Reading it felt vaguely like that story I saw recently about a man who photoshops himself into his childhood photos. I probably bought the diary at the Scholastic Book Fair. It’s lavender and has a little lock and key, though the flimsy lock was long broken. As expected, it was full of stupid observations (My crush in fourth grade apparently had really great hair) and dumb questions (Why does my sister always steal my stuff?) scattered with occasional big unanswerable ones (Am I weird or does everyone feel this way?). What struck me as I was reading it were two things: the endearment with which I wrote to an inanimate audience of blank pages and then the jarring pivot that occurred in early adolescence as I swallowed some outside judge and birthed an inner critic.

I’ve been writing about this already. In the book draft that has become another book draft, the chapter on a…