i find myself searching for old selves.

as is quickly becoming a yearly routine, i took another peek inside my diary from when i was around six to eight years old. you know, sometimes you read a book and one part stands out but the next time you read it, something else pops out at you. that happened to me. i have so much respect for my younger self and so little respect for myself that i wonder if we're even the same person anymore. i also have much more compassion for her than i do for myself right now. i've said this before but all the things that-- i? she? we?-- wrote while leaping through the door of assumption turned out to be true. maybe the saddest thing is that if i sit and think long enough i can see the first traces of... well, everything.

november thirteenth, nineteen ninety nine
mom said i'm her baby. i do not belive (sp) her. i used to behave.

used to as in... wasn't at the time? what was i doing that made me say that? and worse, what the hell was my mother doing that made me say that? i was only six, for fuck's sake.

august eighth, two thousand 

i am having a hard time.

that's actually the entirety of that entry. almost as if i couldn't even express why or what it was that was troubling me. there's nothing written before this for about five months. i think i know why i said this, so i don't think it was sadness so much as frustration that made me write this. who knows.

i don't know why i idealize my younger self so much. maybe it's because my parents used to drop lines like, you never behaved/acted/spoke like this when you were a child, in a way that clearly said those were the days. or maybe it's because she had more self-confidence than i do. i-- or, to be mentally accurate, she-- wrote things like, today i'm going to win the science fair and then did it. i didn't think anything was impossible. and the cool thing is that i did everything i could to prove that was true. i didn't think there were things i couldn't do. when you're young, adults say you can do anything you put your mind to. then as you get older, they begin to tell you to be realistic as if believing in yourself was the most absurd thing they ever heard. then they plant ideas in your head of what you should do, as if you weren't capable of dreaming on your own. or maybe that's just me.

the past is a grotesque animal.

i've got something that's kind of but not really a date with puck tomorrow. not sure how i managed to swing that one. i should channel a bit of that self-confidence that i had as a child. i remember him saying once, after i joked about him being in love with himself, that you won't be able to love anyone if you don't love yourself first. i don't believe that, really. probably because of the immense amount of self-loathing i deal with on a regular basis. but then, this level of self-loathing only comes with an equal amount of self-obsession. so maybe in some twisted way, i love myself. or at least, i love myself enough to hate the current version of myself. i don't know.

i can't figure this out right now. 

honestly.