lessons learned from the WB

Now that I'm done with One Tree Hill, I'm going to have to start wasting my life away again in reruns of Capeside.

But seriously, there was one episode of Dawson's Creek where Joey gets an assignment from school which forces her to choose the one person who knows her best, and that person has to write an essay about her.

I think about that assignment a lot.

Hands down, my husband knows me best. Now.

But aside from him, I'd be absolutely terrified to read what anyone else would write.

Is that normal?

I am still in the Three Kings mindset... "no one knows their own heart."

Does that mean that our only inklings into who we really are lie in our interactions with others? Or, does it mean that our true identities are simply a mystery on earth and will be revealed in heaven?

If I don't know who I am, how can I change it?

I should stop trying to philosophize teen soaps.

But I could totally rock out on an essay about Pacey.

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.