'Some big-shot bitch who’s got the whole damn world figured out'
Aug 4, 1998
I wrote the above pages in August 1998, just barely in my teens. Reading it now a quarter-century later, I’m appalled at how much is the same. I am largely still stuck with the schism of wanting to ‘withdraw from society completely’ versus ‘ambush society and make a change.’ I still feel like I’m on the right track and yet somehow completely lost. And even now I feel like I’m some big shot bitch (!) even though I no longer have anything figured out.
That might be the biggest difference between then and now that I’m noticing. In recent years I’ve been thoroughly disabused of the notion that I have things figured out. I remember what it was like when certainty reigned, though. It was back in the era of these pages. Even as I cutely wrestled with worries about my immaturity, I was full of certitude. I had no tools or know-how, but I chased my questions until they were spiral bound. I interrogated them with gel pen, and I got results. As the words appeared on the page I examined them for honesty. I had a very active internal barometer and I was always calibrating it. Sometimes, like here, I skipped around and merely scratched the surface. Sometimes, with certain topics, I went dozens of pages deep, drilling down to the essence of the thing, and even further if that’s possible. I’d go until I found something that felt true. And, god, the constant angst over seeing myself know something was true and then fail to act on it. “I’ve got to start now, with my true self.”
I really like this girl, though, the one who says she wants to live long enough to “make a difference when I’m young, and ‘move out on society’ when I’m old”—because that way—“I win twice!” The fucking balls on her. She cracks me up.
Without getting too maudlin or sentimental, I have to say (if only for my future self, because what is this if not another note for my future self to read another quarter century from now) that one of the reasons why the era I’m currently in is so fucking hard to live through is because it’s the first time I’m coming to grips with the fact that half my life has passed and that my beautiful goal—my intention to make a big difference in the first half of my life—didn’t quite come to pass. I’ve reached a lot of people, but not in as big a way as I hoped. It is bitter to know this. Bitter to admit. My task now is scarier than any I remember facing before: I have to accept my failure, get over it, keep going and not let the bitterness become me. I don’t have the certitude I used to have, so I don’t have that to draw on. But I remember having it. I had it and it ran so deep that what I was probably most certain of, more certain than I’d been about anything, was this: myself. I was certain I’d figure it the fuck out. I was certain I’d win at life. I was so certain, I thought I’d win twice.
And maybe I still will. I had kindly defined “old” as being aged “60 or something.” Plenty of time still to figure out what the fuck kind of difference I can make, and then fulfill my other teenage dream by squeezing in some tax evasion in Puerto Rico.