Introduction. July 12 2025

When I was a shyly aspiring writer in my mid-20s, all of my writing was destroyed. Diaries since I was ten years old, stories, books of poems, everything I had ever typed on my typewriter, and the beginning of a first novel.

After a while, I started writing again. But instead of filling whole books with tiny neat handwriting as before, I found that I couldn’t leave the notebooks in peace. I ripped pages from their bindings almost as quickly as I’d written on them. I had a wild need to open the cover of every notebook to a blank page, and felt destabilized at seeing my own words. Starting around 2014, I began to collect some of the paper debris and type certain passages into a Google Doc called “DAILIES”.

A decade later, still compulsively shredding my notebooks, still transcribing DAILIES, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. The psychiatrist, through her glassy blue eyes, from behind her enormous desk, told me that it had probably been undiagnosed since my late teens. That day, my first reaction was deep and intense grief. My second reaction, as strong as the grief, was this: Fuck it, we ball.

Remembering who gives a shit, and life’s short and then you die, I began to feel that I didn’t need to categorize everything I did as sorry, corrupt, and insufficient, because really, what did it matter? Fuck fear, and fuck self-hatred, and fuck my ongoing belief that I am fundamentally shitty. As an experiment in low-stakes, unapologetic self-disclosure, I decided to start posting my remaining journals where they are unlikely to be seen by my friends and family. I will never be gracious enough to justify the publication of these entries, most of which have never been read even by myself. But, I will proceed from 2014 and might even one day catch up to the present.

I am not grand and glowing, as I sometimes think. Not lowly and unworthy, as I sometimes think. I’m just another person.

Thanks for stopping by. I’m glad you’re here.

2014

September 8, 2014

James Baldwin: Where did he learn to write like this? How? The style is marvellous, reads like silk. Diego and I sat on his inflatable bed and read together, silently, stopping now and then to look up a word in french, usually a dirty one.

Feel vaguely that I am doing wrong.

Glad to be sleeping alone for the first night in a while. Applied at Perry's but they only want a foodrunner and I want to be a waiter. I will tell them so. That I'm only interested in the job if they'll train me to be a waiter. That I love my current job. Perry's made me fill out one of those odious form applications. Under special skills I wrote: "Tough as nails, sweet as honey."

Feel vaguely that I am not good. Something to do with evasion. I will trace and solve my own problems, since I've decided against therapy.

Proud to have abdicated some of my privileges, but anxious to regain some others. Mostly personality traits I suppose.

Looking forward to working at Tazza tomorrow. I feel better knowing that the reason I get afternoon shifts isn't that I'm being punished for taking time off, it's just because Cassady can only work in the mornings.

Hella: "What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had." -Giovanni's Room

October 24, 2014

Just remembered my dream from last night, as I was looking up courses for next semester

It was a sad, and long, and difficult dream
twilight or underground, working on a computer in a cavernous marble room with huge columns. Working on homework , with my notebooks in a stack and my laptop lit, I was conscious of the few other studiers at their tables far away from me, all of us facing away from each other.

Footsteps rang somewhere, the hour was late. I finally stumbled into an honors seminar.

In the seminar room I found the friends I wanted to have, and yearned to find a way to be appointed to their ranks. A lecturer- an old man- was talking about some painting. I found some people I had once known, I was jealous of them. I left- I had to- and stepped into long empty carpeted halls, borrowed from the Waldorf Astoria. I ran, and running found a friend- a girl like me. She was thinner though, and beautiful, dark, vaguely troubled in a sexy way. She was running too, but I lost her on a switchback of carpeted stairway.

Then after classes, I saw the throng get into little chute-like elevators to go deeper underground.

I wandered through fantastic rooms. Some bright, some dim, some cheerful, and the colors were onyx, dark blue, deep turquoise.

I snuck into the men’s bathroom, there was hair in the tub- I wandered into the other one, brightly lit and pink. I wandered through dim miraculous rooms. Tiffany style, oriental, modern, I wandered looking for my notebooks, which I had lost somewhere. In the bathroom? In the hallway?

I was not welcome there, retracing my steps, and then it was time for the honors students to go from the central amphitheater where they were conversing and communing with mentors, to their homes. They hung their heads and stepped into the round elevators, going down underground to tiny windowless cells. And when they were gone I was lonely, and though I still wanted to be among them, I knew that it was not a nice place there, underground.

November 8, 2014

collections.

(first, it's a lute, he responds, stretching out one large puffy headphone to hear the questioner. )

dad, first
Diane
Hannah
these are in no particular order.

Paul, and maybe Daniel.

My professors: Pagani first, and most challening.
then Bullock, what a sweet lady.
Pelletiers is too easy to please.

. . . I say, is that chris over there? No, it isn't Chris it is a girl. a girl with hair like Chris's. At the next table is that one bearded barista who isn't as nice as he looks, and then Lyndon, looking healthy and happy and hooded, a girl with him, undoubtedly his woman.

Christine, I love her.

Elizabeth

Margaret: I think of often but we do not speak. She must be sad to miss me.

Jennifer. except not in the same way.

myself, please.

who am i?

Goals, the best and worst five things, and the homework :
1. the homework from group therapy: the notecard containing the pros and cons
2. homework: from phonetics class, because it is easily dispatched and because I am pretty far behind. I'll do the reading and take the notes and later listen to the audio exercises, over and over and over and over again.
3. I'll begina a list of music to download; I only have until the end of tomrrow to get whatever i will.
4. Emails, correspondence: I must call Barbara and leave a message about the electrical outlets and the blinds.
I wish I were more androgynous. expecially tonight, when I feel so fiercely beautiful, so angrily ... delicate. The lipstick that shines will not withstand a sip from the cup perched ... please pull out a cigarette, handsome man facing me, and I will bum it from you... no, it is only water. damn.
the moon! ah, viper hanging joyful and brighter even than the sodium lights.

death comes to us all, so i had better get working on this novel already.

(t, s, o, y, c, i, i, are the letters, in that order, on her scrabble tray)

November 18, 2014

Good evening. I'm at Epoch to study phonetics. and, I'm sharing a table with a handsome. But zut alors I forgot my notebook!

Oh well, an excuse to journal my weekend, which lasted an eternity and passed too quickly. The first night at the parents’, Thursday, there was no Diane. I texted Hannah that she really hurt my feelings when she went back on her promise to find an apartment together. Then I cried and crawled into bed with Maggie and we held each others hands and fell asleep that way. The next day was the one, Diane’s wedding day.

I woke in the morning to motivate dad to make scrambled eggs for everyone,. Everything he tries to do now is more difficult because of his mangled arm, though he hides his injury expertly. Breakfast was delivered to me by T-bot as i was having my hair and makeup done by the stylist, Kelsey, who comes from a three stoplight town in East Texas where she and her twin, daughters of the basketball coach, were famous everywhere they went for being tall.

My hair and makeup took forty five minutes. Then it was on: the florist to be entertained, the downstairs to be arranged, tea lights and decorations distributed, children to be told not to play with the umbrellas upstairs if you please.
Diane herself was exemplary in her calm. The other bridesmaid, Madison, was getting on her nerves, so she asked me to be a buffer.

the boys showed up- Kevin and his brothers- and I directed them how to move out the chairs. Then Maggie and Elizabeth and I collected the pillows and put them out. Noon to three fled quickly, then Everyone was called in to do a quick walk through of the first part up of the ceremony. then it was time! Guests began to arrive and had to be corrallled outside towards all the cmismkatched chairs and pillows and quilts and paper flowers and rose petals on the ground. To get their hot cocoa and settle beneath quilts against the chilly afternoon.

After the walk-through Madison and I went upstairs to dress the bride. what an honor, to place grandma's ermine stole over her shoulders. Diane didn't really seem to like grandma, but anyway. She wanted to do a photo shoot called "fist looks" that i had not heard of before. She had me cleaar out the front hall so she could go down out the front door, then to find kevin and send him out the side door. I watched from the other side of the street. Kevin had to wait facing the other direction for a ong time before Diane came around the corner of the street. Finally he turned around (inscrutable man) and they kissed for the photographer.

The ceremony, the ceremony... I can't describe it now, maybe later. Instead---

back to today. It is Tuesday, and things seem to have calmed down, with the aid of a yesterday spent in bed rolling back and forth between food and petting the cat.

November 19, 2014

5:06a
Today I’m going to try to do it all, every single thing on that checklist. So the first thing is to have breakfast between eight and nine, and I have three hours to get ready for that. Because I decided to go with my first whim today and wake up at five. Schmo is being a good best friend and chatting me up a lot. the place is still a bit messy after that eventful weekend, and maybe before eight I can take care of some of that. I wonder if my neighbors will be able to hear if I listen to the BBC. Probably, since I can hear their alarms going off in the morning if I’m attentive (rare)

November 21, 2014

If I were braver, or, current impulses:

No computer. I don’t need a computer. No phone. I don’t need a cell phone. Although, most of my “I don’t need a cell phone” arguments are based on “I have a computer.”
Anyway, one of them could go. Then both, later.

All of this stuff. All of this STUFF. Maybe I will stay in this apartment a while longer. I keep bouncing around from gmail to google voice to toothpastefordinner to marriedtothesea to theworstthingsforsale to thisamericanlife and if I didn’t have a computer I would be reading instead.

I could move it, or I could unplug it, turn it off.
SIGH. yeah, that’s while i’ll do. Unplug it, turn it off. Put it on the floor behind the table. Not watch TV for a while. Get the news on my phone. ok ok. ok, ok. Goodnight computer. (it’s twelve nineteen am on the twenty first of november 2014)

December 3, 2014

Good. Morning. Third day in a row of waking and having breakfast without any hitch.

I found a new Cocorosie album I haven’t listened to yet, Tales of a Grass Widow. (score)

And I found out (by asking him out) that Alex from French class is gay.
But I asked Dana from the library on a date
so I am too.

I’m esckited because I’ve never been on a date with a girl before.
And she likes me, she even said she’s had a crush on me forever.

I wish Paul would get home from his date and get online so I could freaking tell him about it! But here I go merrily into the kitchen to bed.

What a whirlwind of a day! I think I’m tired enough to fall asleep soon. I still feel torn, in life, in different directions. Dancing with Erica over the weekend, with Erica! writing a paper, editing a skit, socializing with Alex, with Joe, with Heather, with Dana (!). To make music, practice vioin, research graduate programs, look for a job. all these things. Feeding myself, all this reading I want to do, and then…

I remember a day with Michael and Emily Bruner. Emily, studying to be a nurse, is slim and impeccable. Not quite beautiful, but with straight undyed hair and respectable clothing. Not too stylish, casual. She and I walked alone down the railroad tracks near Reunion Station and Tower, next to the field of twisted metal that had been Reunion Arena. Giant pieces jutting from the ground at all angles. Downtown on the horizon. We talked about dependence, and she told me the story…

…of a man, a rich man, who used to take her out to dinner, or shopping, or along with him to parties. Very polite, she said, never “fresh”. He spent lots of money on her, enjoyed her company. One day he called her on the phone and said “Would you be interested in lunch, dinner, sex? All of the above, none of the above?” She didn’t say anything. He never called her again.

At dinner, Emily reaches across the restaurant table to point with an oval nail at a certain menu item, then reads it aloud in an incredible voice. Incredible and natural. and the reach of her finger not purposefully seductive. What is tragic about this memory? why does it stick with me?

I like sleeping in this little kithen. the floor is just big enough for the mattress. I am contained. Feel safe.

Alexander C_______. What a mythology I had built around my desire for him. And now I find myself free to talk to him without nerves, without games, without designs. “So this is good,” says Maggie. “It is almost better this way,” she says.

Maggie who has stories for everything.
The last one she told me yesterday while I was breaking up with Daniel. it was about a boy named Andrew, I think, when she was in college. She called him on the phone to break up with him, while Dane was in the room. Andrew asked why, and Maggie told him that he was just so awkward. "Which was true, but I shouldn’t have said so." Maggie told me she didn’t think Andrew had ever had a kiss before, that she was his first kiss.

My heart hurts. I should not have asked Dana out. I am thinking of the other girl from the Architecture Library. The one with the long curly hair. A date with her would have been a more pure, a more exciting thing. With Dana, well, I’m … not sure.

I asked her out because I thought it would make her happy and because I wanted to ask out a girl. It wasn’t because she is who she is. It wasn’t for herself. It wasn’t a heart pounder.

It is becoming easier to feed myself. I love the world. I love humans. Truisms and platitudes. Dearly I wish to live in Croatia. Dearly I wish to live with Elaine. Dearly I wish to be near Maggie. Dearly I wish to have success. To be independent. To have financial freedom.
And onward. December. Time for me to get a job. Where will I work? At a bookstore? For Dig Site?

Yes, I am tired enough to sleep tonight. But I am not at rest. My soul boils. Today I have been exited, disappointed, angry, proud, confident, embarassed, false, sweet, intimidating, invisible,

But not very kind, I find.