Going backwards

I see I haven't posted here since February so perhaps it's time for a new post. I guess there is this tension for me between wanting to share deeper thoughts and feelings on here, and at the same time wanting to protect myself. Probably the best thing to do would be to focus on newsy-type posts where I update about where I've been and what I've been up to that's interesting. For example, I could post about the sustainable farm that I visited a few weeks ago and talk about their carbon-saving strategies, or about the honey farm I visited this weekend and how the colonies of bees work, how honey is collected, the properties of propolis... Or the very nice seafood we had in Newquay (Wales) and the dolphins we saw playing in the bay. All this stuff is interesting and fun, yet I don't seem to make the time to post about it.

Instead, what I feel like posting about are the adventures into my mind, and body to a certain extent, since they aren't separate things really. As it was Sunday yesterday, one of the tasks I had set for myself was to clear out some of my old stuff to make way for the things that my soon-to-be-hubby will be bringing with himself when he moves in two and a half weeks from now. I shifted a box from a closet and found it labeled 'correspondence'. Well I don't know about you, but I find it irresistible sometimes when faced with a box containing old letters and the like, to simply shift it without at least having a peek inside. So naturally I did open it up, and found not only letters but also my diaries from about age 12 onwards. I was pretty sporadic with diary-keeping so there are only 5 or 6 of them, sometimes spanning 2 years. There's a gap where I first started blogging as I guess that was an alternative outlet then, and there's only so much writing about your life you can do.

I have to say this, reading your diaries from years back is an almost surreal experience. You know that's it's you yourself that wrote them, although it seems like another you, a different person. I remember writing some of the posts quite clearly, especially ones that had early experiences with the opposite sex. And there were things I didn't even admit within the pages, but that I alluded to in ways that jog my memory now. In some ways it was quite fun reading through, but in other ways it also brought up loads of pain too. And looking back at what it was like then, when it felt like anything was possible because my whole life was ahead of me, brings up disappointment that I didn't do many of the things I'd hoped to as well. After reading through I found myself battling with some of the negative feelings that I had written about at different stages in life, particularly from when I was 15! So I'm torn now. On one hand, they are a record of those times of life. On the other hand, they seem to have recorded a disproportionate amount of the bad times, probably due to the nature of diary-keeping, as a place to vent or come to terms with things. Part of me wants to destroy them, to leave behind the negatives of the past and think only day by day. But another part of me sees them as precious, even in all their sadness in some ways. I did feel compelled though, to ask the hubby-to-be to destroy them if for some reason I died before him.

Maybe I should work on writing them into an auto-biography of sorts, or better still, a fictionalized, anonymized novel. Then I could pull out the positives, re-write the bad stuff with the benefits of hindsight, and get rid of the offending things forever. Because am I really want to look back when I'm an old lady and remember all the painful times and sadness? I think from now on at least I should make a point of recording the good and beautiful things in life much more and focusing my attention on them as much as possible.