Having just moved back into my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house after graduating college, I’m in a whirlwind process of going through all of my old stuff. I was always the kind of person to start a diary, write in it for maybe a week, and then give up, which is why I’ve come across a bunch of barely-used notebooks in my purge.
As a child of the internet, I used Tumblr and Twitter as a stand-in for a traditional diary since starting in 2011, after I decided that DeviantArt wasn’t cutting it. Thankfully, my Tumblr is gone from the internet, but being on the internet like that when I was 16 apparently had an Effect on me, based on one of the more filled out journals I found.
My two best friends and I were going to be in different states the summer after ninth grade and wanted a way to keep in touch while we were apart. We went to Build-A-Bear at the Roosevelt Field Mall, made a teddy bear modeled after our bio teacher, and decided to do a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-type thing where we would keep the bear for a few weeks, write in a journal about what we were doing, and mail it to the next person.
We managed to do this for two summers before my two best friends got in a fight, decided to not be friends anymore, and stopped talking without me noticing for two months. LMAO!