Kapybara The Art Collective

What having a journal since the beginning of the 2000s has taught me

My mother thinks that all people are constantly in the process of becoming somebody different from their present selves. Indeed, it takes only a decade for most cells in our bodies to renew themselves, making us all objectively different people from our past selves. Therefore the teenager who was me at the beginning of the 2000s physically no longer exists. But does she exist as the same personality, or what some of us believe in (myself included), the same soul?

This is a question I have been thinking about a lot lately. Having experienced some big changes in the last couple of years —getting married, getting a bachelor´s degree, changing the country I live in several times- I feel like I am gradually losing touch with my old self. Who was the Tuula who learned to read and discovered the joys and challenges of writing? Who was the Tuula who moved to another country to study? What was she thinking, dreaming of? I might try to reach her thoughts by merely reminiscing. But all I can reach is a projection of my current self´s thoughts of my past self.

I have noticed a certain phenomenon about memories that seems to grow stronger as I grow older. They keep fading and fading, and unless they are being brought to the forefront of your mind for some reason, they seem to continue their way to eventually disappear for good.

Lately, I have been gifted some evidence of this phenomenon through a friend of mine. She happens to have an excellent memory and is often referring to things that may have happened over 10 years ago. More often than not, I must confess to her I have no recollection of what she is talking about. Yet, it sounds perfectly plausible these things have happened to us- for they are all pretty trivial, and she has no reason for making them up. When listening to her, I often realize I have just become a different person, in whose limited catalog of memories these lost ones do not fit.

At the beginning of June, I was cleaning my childhood room and stumbled upon the box where I keep my old journals. I have had one ever since I learned how to write. All in all, my diaries cover 2/3 of my life, all the way until the beginning of the pandemic when I stopped writing for a little while. It´s amazing how much text a teenager can produce when they are determined to immortalize the tiniest happenstances of their lives. Who knew there was a novel hidden in a 12th birthday party of a dance school friend?

I sat down for a while to go through the parts of my archive that I feel are written by someone capable of making dependable observations of their surroundings. This meant waltzing past the first two years of my journaling history, which can be summarised in a few sentences.

“Dear Diary,

I am so bored! Mom is not home yet. Dad is talking to his radio (he was and still is an avid amateur radio operator) and my brother is visiting my cousin. What can I do? I am so bored!”

It makes total sense when you think about it. Opening the diary as a 7-year-old was the last option when there was nothing more interesting to do. It took me a couple of years to learn to deal with the lack of external stimulus, and even a couple more to thoroughly enjoy writing as a process, and not as the last refuge for entertainment.

Apart from the retrograde development of my handwriting from neat cursive (me as the always-bored little nuisance) to virtually undecipherable mess (me as someone who has agency in my own life), there was one thing that caught my eye, the longer I read. Even entries from journals from as late as 2015 have a narrator that I do not recognize. Yet, she is me. She has to be me, because of the events she describes, most of which I can recall either on my own or through the report given to me in my text.

Who is this person who wrote about the agonies of adolescence — the curious, inexplicable feeling of externality- the hurt of unrequited love? Who is this person who wrote so candidly about faith, about God? I feel a strange sense of admiration and a sense of familiarity. But it is like I am looking at a relative, whom I like and appreciate. She seems close to me, yet she is not me. We might understand each other, but we are not the same person.

There´s something touching and even beautiful about the naivety of these girls in my diaries. They dreamed of many things — and feared very little. Reading the texts by my past selves, I am reminded of how many of my past dreams have been fulfilled. I am also reminded that even as a child, I could look at others and care for their well-being. It is reassuring at times when I feel like I have let people down.

Some of the dreams of my past selves are still there— the dream of making art that will affect many people, for example. I am on my way, though. I want to not let the girls from my diaries down. They would probably look at my current self equally in awe and think: Who is this strong, unique woman? How did I become her?

Even writing can be deceiving. I recognize it especially in my journals from the ages 11 to 13. Back then, I was a huge fan of Emily of New Moon by Lucy Maud Montgomery, even so much that people called me the poem girl (which was the Finnish title). And so, I included long and ornamental descriptions of nature in my diaries of that era, just like Emily, to whom I strongly related. I even used the term she uses for a feeling of bittersweet joy ones gets when one sees something that is so breathtakingly beautiful, that it moves the curtain between this world and heaven: the flash.

Don´t get me wrong — I did all this because I genuinely felt connected to Emily and her way of seeing the world. But it colored my writing style in such a way, that I probably emphasized experiences that fit the narrative of a poem girl, and didn´t include other ones that didn´t. However, without the diaries, I wouldn´t be able to remember just how much of a poem girl I truly was back then. And that would be a shame.

As a final takeaway: if you do not have a journal yet, pick up an empty notebook and start writing. Photos of your past self might show you what you used to look like. But they won´t show you what you thought or felt.

Writing is the only way to truly reach and grab your past self´s hand. It is the only way to preserve the key to even a little bit of the enigma that is you.

Want to dive deeper into the feelings of this post? I made a playlist while writing:

Apparat- Song of Los

Roosevelt- Losing touch

Simon & Garfunkel- America

Mew- Introducing Palace Players

Sufjan Stevens- Should have known better

Bicep- Glue (check the music video — it´s the bomb.)

Anathema- Untouchable Part 1 and 2

Listen to it here.

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This article was first published on Medium on Jun 28, 2022.

This article was written using only natural stupidity. I hope you get the joke, because I do not want to farm engagement for the real keywords, if I can help it.