Cheer up, you silly sod

[shinytoaster]

Yesterday evening I went back to my LJ archive and started reading some of the old entries from December 2001 through to the summer of 2002, when I was in my second year at university, still writing in Potter fandom - although by this point I had moved onto writing smut - and mooching around feeling lovesick over a red-headed boy who I never did go out with. It's painful, angst-ridden late-adolescent stuff, man.

I suspect pretty much everybody feels this way when they read back through old diaries from years ago, but really ... someone should have shot me. Or at the very least written me a stern letter.

There was a great piece by Stephen Fry in last week's Guardian, cribbed from the 25th anniversary edition of Gay Times, in which he responded to a letter written by his 16 year-old self to his grown-up self. Paraphrased in nine words, it read 'cheer up you silly sod, it's not that bad.'

Looking back at the three things that exercised me in 2002 - George W Bush, the feeling that everyone else is having a much better time than you, and being single - one of them has fucked off back to Texas, one of them holds true for everyone, and the third is moot, although I am still lacking the designer seafront pad in Brighton and the fast car.

So really? It wasn't that bad, and that's advice I'd love to be able to give my 19 year-old self.

Comments

[flourish]

I am having the same experience looking back on my own early journals. I'm also astonished to find out that you were only 19 - I, being 14 or 15 at the time, felt like that was astonishingly old and as though I had nothing at all in common with you adult beings. Which is funny now of course.

[longtimegone]

Oh man, I feel the same way when I read my old entries. I was 22 and INCREDIBLY NAIVE/AWKWARD/STUPID. It makes me cringe to read, though it's kind of fascinating having a record of where I've progressed over the past 6ish years.

I want to tell my old self that it wasn't that bad, too, and to enjoy the whole college thing because working every day was such a bitchslap in the face with reality. :))

[elements]

I think I spent a good deal of the first couple years I knew you wishing I could give you a hug and a mug of cocoa. But I guess that's those years, no matter what, really, and I wasn't that far out of them myself... I look back at my old LJ entries and cringe.

[chris]

Eh, I look at my old LJ entries and think "Wow, I wish I had the time and vitality to write like that any more" - it's all been downhill from there for me, man! Perils of being a late starter, I guess; my juvenilia is as, well, juvenile in its way as everybody else's, it's just not on LJ.