i don't recognize her

I've heard it said that all of us look at the past wearing rose-colored glasses.

I didn't think that was true for me. I'm a realist, after all.

But, I think maybe a defense mechanism or two have kicked in since the good ol' teenage years. Or maybe it's just that I now have enough distance between myself and who I used to be, and I can finally see just how I used to be.

I wish that there were spot on the space-time continuum where all of my selves could just meet up. Although, I'm not sure what sort of preemptive measures I would have even known to take.

All this angst is stemming from the pages of a diary I wrote during my high school years. I recently found it in a box in the basement of my mother's house. And I hope to heaven she never read it, because I'm sure it would have broken her heart if she had.

It broke mine.

From cover to cover, I repeat the same mistakes. I'm horrible in what I say about myself. And I don't think I ever mention being happy about anything. Not even once.

Instead, I'm boy FANATICAL. I'm self-disparaging. I'm abused by "friends." I'm horribly mean to people. I'm angry. I'm scared. I'm trying to prove myself. And I am constantly giving pieces of myself away to anyone who will take them, and the result is an empty, sad mess.

I agree that most teenagers are probably melodramatic at best in their journals, but for some reason, I guess I'd always thought while I went through my share of junk in my youth, I somehow rose above the remnants graciously.

Instead, I know recognize just how incredibly out of control I was.

I think that the worst part of everything I read was just how cluelessly I spoke about God. And actually, what's most surprising is that I've come as far as I have despite who I thought God was back then.

I think that this is the first time that I don't feel 17. I feel like that girl I was then is a stranger, and I am actually a grown-up.

And you know what? The context of those pages are probably no different than how most teenage girls are nowadays. It's obvious what approval I was seeking. It's obvious the things that I valued. It's obvious I was lost and lonely.

There are hints that the author is a part of the me I know today, and those similarities are frightening. While I've come a long way since 14, I'm still struggling with confidence in any and everything I do. I feel as though I'm mostly a coward. And I've never learned how not to expect the worst.

And my biggest fear? That history will repeat itself. I don't kid myself that my daughter will be exempt from the trials of coming of age... But, if her teenage diary is anything like mine, I won't be able to help feeling like a failure as a mother.

My mother would agree that I know better than she did. My mother was an very young mother with lots of odds stacked against her that I don't have.

I'm not asking for a gaurantee about anything. But is it too much to ask to change history a little?

I know that the knee-jerk reaction to all this is to just tell me to be grateful for the victories in my past. To know that I am who I am because of where I've been. There is value in that, I know... but is it wrong for me to just want to NOT have been who I was?

I didn't know I was still this fragile.