December 18, 2024 - Time capsule

Recently I found an external hard drive from undergrad. It's been sitting on my work table gathering dust for a few months, but I connected it to my computer yesterday to see what needed to be salvaged. Clicking around the folders for a while revealed it was from my senior year in art college, most likely the start of the first semester. I found some digital pieces that I thought were long gone with the corruption of this hard drive's predecessor the semester prior, and some tidbits to save for later. But what caught my attention was a folder labeled "Diary". Strange, since I'd never kept a written journal before 2020; my sketchbook had essentially been my diary when I was growing up. Opening the folder revealed two text files dated a couple days apart from each other in March 2017. I skimmed the contents.

The digital entries had been written during a "break" with my then-boyfriend (we'll call him S). The tone in each one is the complete opposite of the other. The first entry is a (never sent) letter to S that I must have written after leaving his place, expelling my feelings of sadness and loneliness and promising that, despite my hurt, I loved him deeply and wanted to be with him. The second entry was more angry and bitter, having had a few days to process the circumstances that led up to the break and his seemingly carefree attitutde in the aftermath. Despite the tone in this second entry, S and I did stay together after the break. He'd go on to break things off two years later and in the process hurt me worse than any other partner had, and has ever done since.

As I was reading these, my heartbeat sped in a familiar rhythm as anxiety welled between my ribs. It's a feeling I'm not used to anymore but for most of my life was white noise. These diary entries are a time capsule of who I was before the breakup, before the hardship and self-discovery that came after it, all of which culminated into who I am now. I have complicated feelings about who I used to be before that breakup, who I used to date and give my affections to. I had pretty bad taste in men before I stopped dating them for good. I felt like I had to live up to an unattainable level of attractiveness and twist myself into someone that a potential partner would be willing to stick around for. It was an exhausting way to live.

The road from there to where I am now was a long journey. I dug my way back to the core of myself during the pandemic, made friends across the country, graduated with a masters, changed careers, changed pronouns, moved out, adopted two cats, got engaged. It's a short list on paper, but it's a lot of accomplishments in five short years. And in that time I've gotten better at reconciling who I was with who I am. It gets easier to look at her not as an embarassing period of my life, but just someone that I used to know.