Kaylee Chan explores memory and nostalgia by riffling through the ‘junk’ drawer with items that defined her childhood.
“In the future, I’ll probably look back [and] think that my current 13-year-old self was pretty immature. I don’t feel immature at all though… then again, I didn’t feel much immature in sixth grade but now I consider that version of me to be pretty innocent and uninformed about the world. There was so much I didn’t know…”
– Kaylee Chan on Oct. 20, 2018 at 6:37 PM
“Dork Diaries.” “Dear Dumb Diary.” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” I grew up surrounded by a rich tradition of middle-grade literature centered around kids writing about the trials and tribulations of their school lives. When I first read these series, it never occurred to me that I could follow in their footsteps.
When I did start journaling regularly, around the end of seventh grade, I did not call it a diary. I didn’t scribble words in a composition notebook and doodle in the margins like the books of my childhood portrayed diaries to be. All I did was start with a blank Google Doc and begin typing.
The inciting incident that prompted me to start journaling is a personal one, but if I were to boil it down, I’d say it started because some of my friends were taking comfort in writing down their thoughts. I thought it sounded like a good idea. It was a tumultuous time in our tween-age years. I took it up for the emotional catharsis as well as the sake of capturing the present — a present which, all too suddenly, was falling into the past. I’d say the latter reason is why I’ve maintained my daily journal entries for half a decade. Sometimes I skip every other day or, in extreme circumstances, gloss over weeks at a time, but I never fail to return and try to recount what I miss. If I do not write about a day, I feel as if it has fallen out of my grasp, like a dream fading out of memory after one wakes up.
It is not as if I have trouble remembering the past. My friends are sometimes surprised by my ability to recall events from my childhood. In fact, I think my retention of past memories and my compulsion to journal stem from the exact same instinct. I want to remember my past. I want to have it readily accessible to me. I want a personalized archive of all that I’ve done and everyone I’ve ever been. In that sense, my journal shares a similar function with long-term memory but is more objective, structured and reliable. Recalling the past is one thing. Reading about it from the perspective of my past self is another.
It is only because I started writing my daily life down so early that I know what happened exactly five years ago on the day of writing this column. It was my last day of middle school. “It was about time, honestly,” I wrote. I did not elaborate, instead proceeding to talk about the rest of the day’s mundanities. Musicals I was listening to. The ramen place we ate at for dinner. Visiting the library and borrowing a Charles Dickens novel. (I do not remember reading it.)
Much of my other entries were (and still are) of a similar tenor — quotidian, but delightfully so. Life milestones were quickly eclipsed by everyday babble. Even when I wrote about friend problems, school problems, or other issues that must’ve felt like my entire world at the time of writing, they became nothing but bumps in the road in the larger scheme of things.
In this way, journaling allows me to view my entire life with a freeing sense of distance. Regardless of what joys or struggles I experience, they all end up resting in the same place — a few sentences on a Google Doc. The world moves on. I move on.
Yet, in the act of journaling, I get to take a bit of the present into the future. It is the reason why, a decade from now, I will be able to look through the junk drawers of my past and find a treasure trove full of everything I went through during the most formative years of my life.
For that, I thank my younger self. You have given me what no one else can.