Many people I know have a memory box of some kind to hold the most precious treasures from various points of their lives. Not the trophies or graduation robes or wedding albums, but the truly personal memories, the talismans that mean nothing to anyone except for that person. Mine is a forest green steamer trunk I refer to as “Pandora’s Box.” It’s filled with all sorts of things that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else – a souvenir cup from Hershey Park (1995), a piece of circuit board (Engineering camp, 2001), a baby sweatshirt not worn by anyone in our family (2005). The most important things are the diaries, scrapbooks, and journals I kept from 1993 onward.
As a general rule, I don’t go through the diaries left in Pandora’s Box. I will from time to time flip through the journals from my senior year of high school and college, but those are quotes and pictures – not a diary (it’s also why those books are displayed on a shelf in our living room instead of locked in a dusty corner of the library, but I digress). The earlier diaries are the reason it’s called Pandora’s Box, because they chronicle a time period whose events I have for the most part tried to forget. For years I thought about just burning them – there is an entry in one book in particular I wrote as a ruse because I thought my evil stepfather was reading them, and sure enough I was right, so everything from that point onward was heavily censured or laden with teenaged propaganda. My real feelings and dreams were mailed out in letters to various friends (and probably tossed out long ago), so what was the point of holding onto books of lies? But I never got around to it.
When writing up the Year in Review soundtrack for 2013, I realized this would be an anniversary of sorts – fifteen years before my friends and I wrote the first year in review soundtrack, and it’s one of the few things I’ve consistently done each year since. I got to thinking about what we’d put on that first list, and so last week for the first time in more than a decade I opened the Box with the intent of paging through those diaries. It’s a lot of material – all of my friends at that time lived hours away, so I spent a lot of time writing. A lot of it is the standard teenage girl fare of crushes and gossip, who likes who and overreacting to what really were minor insults or perceived slights. One book in particular, a small blue tome from the year I was fifteen, has to be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism as that is the one where I realized my privacy had been compromised and thus started making stuff up to hide what was really on my mind. This is significant because 1. It is what started my fiction stories from that time and made me think about professional writing, and 2. It showed me early on how easy it was to manipulate someone’s perception of events through nothing but the written word. As I’ve said many times over the years, a well-placed paragraph can do more damage than any weapon in a military arsenal. And it’s true. Sometimes it take a while for the idea to take root, but once it does, the enemy is toast.
The most important thing that I found in those diaries was a sense of freedom – not then, but now. Fifteen-year-old me might not have been 100% honest in her written diary, but she left enough of the truth behind for thirty-year-old me to look at those pains and dreams from a different perspective. The regrets I carried for a long time were unnecessary, because a lot of them weren’t real to begin with. The lessons learned from them, however, most definitely were.
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