The trouble with journaling.

I have kept a journal( sporadically) since I was 9 years old. The process began when my parents took my sister and I to the UK, to visit our family friends who lived in Wales. Their daughter, needing to get away from the farm to reconsider her 40 year old farmer boyfriend, came to live with us when she was 18 and I was maybe 4 or 5. I don't remember much about her visit besides the a brief image of her walking in for the first time, her obsession with Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street, and the night she had ribs at our house for the first time and thought you couldn't use more than one napkin.

I assume we went during Easter, as it was a long vacation. my parents bought my sister and I journals to write in about our trip. My first entry is from 4/19/95 and i feel the need to tell the journal I'm actually from Detroit even though i was in London at the time. The first journal is the one on the left, and I named it Jungle Journal, or JJ( To be followed by Dragon Journal-DJ, Cow Journal-CJ..pictured about, Atlas Journal--Aj, and one i tried to keep in college, who i believe was Music Journal---MJ. CJ and JJ were the only ones that were used with any consistency and were filled completely). according to the back of the journal the graphic is from a rug designed by a guy who died in the 1890's. The first page has a warning that I will cut anyone who reads this out of my will, which i stole from a journal I found in my Uncle's bedroom at my Grandma LeVasseur's house. I also mention the fact I'm going to see Taming of the Shrew the next night- which I will end up falling asleep during, only to wake up to see the male lead taking away Kathrine while wearing a chicken suit. There was also a scene wear people changed their outfits and the one man wore a leopard print thong. This is not mentioned in the journal though.

I have two problems with these journals, as i look back on them now. The first, is that I am a chronic liar. I lie constantly, about stupid little things. When my parents ask me who i stayed with on a certain weekend, i will lie and say i stayed with X when i really stayed with Y. I'll say a song was playing on the radio during a point in while telling a story instead of saying the song was playing in my head. If someone is missing a comb, I swear up and down that i don't know where it is, when I know it's currently holding my place in a book. None of the above paragraph is a lie though. those really did happen. The main problem with these journals is that I am not above lying to myself. Therefore, most of the information in the journals once I hit 5th grade is usually either omitted or lies.

I do not, for instance, chronicle the first time i saw porn, which was not my fault. It is documented later on, after I have already admitted I was gay. The neighbor kid a year younger than me came over with a friend. They knew I was always home alone. I don't remember if they told me what we would look at before it first came on, but i know that I didn't know about porn before then. That day, my mom came home through the back door next to the computer, which she rarely ever does, and we were able to quickly shut everything down before she looked over.

Later i got caught. I had printed some pictures of the computer and, not knowing where to put them, placed them in a drawer in my dad's desk. I ratted the kid out IMMEDIATELY, and was told i couldn't have him over without my parents being home anymore. I kept looking, mainly because I was bored and there wasn't much else to do. I didn't get off to the pictures for a long time. I don't think I even knew how. Eventually the porn transitioned from girls, to porn that prominently featured the guy, to gay porn. I never got better at hiding it. I was caught constantly. My dad hid most of the times from my mom. Unlike other people's dads, Dan never had a secret Porn stash, or at least i never saw it. He didn't react as though it was natural for me to look, he was angry, disgusted, and wouldn't look me in the eye most of the time, even with the straight porn.

In 7th grade, after threats of Military school didn't deter me( as i noted in the passage where i explained all this, why did hey think sending me to a place full of dangerous, in shape boys would make me straight is beyond my thought capacity.) They took me to a child therapist for about 4 months over the winter. I know it was then because I got Christmas gifts of Pokemon cards. I remember opening them and finding out one was the Cloister. I tried to explain the different animals to her, and she was more amused that sometimes their names actually had meaning to what they did ( ie. the cloister is enclosed in itself) and told me that instead of monasteries, nuns lived in Cloisters. This got us on a discussion of the nun's at my school, and she actually took out a medical book and helped me try to identify what the blue mole on Sr. Anne's lip was.

I talked about everything to her, until she brought up the images, or anything about sex. then i stopped talking. I wish I hadn't stopped talking. I feel like I could have been alot saner in High school if I had. After these 3-4 months, she had a meeting with my parents. Since we stopped after that, I assume she told them that I didn't want to talk about the porn, and that if I was gay, it was just gonna happen. Around the time I came out to my sister, we were talking about it and then I mentioned the therapist. Kathleen had never known I went to one. Ever. It wasn't talked about, which I find weird, since I distinctively remember watching TV with her( my appts were on the weekend) and being told it was time to go.

There is a 6 month blank in the journals over this time. when i pick up again in April, there's no discussion of what happened or an attempt, as there is at other times of long absences, to catch up to the current situation.

I never talk about the porn in them, or being found out. I don't mention the therapist. I never mention crushes on boys, and make up ones on girls. I know my first crush on another male was Steve Taglione in 6th grade, a not entirely unattractive boy with a alcoholics knob nose and tend to flush pink who wasn't fat but had a bit of weight there. Later, post-crush, i would find out at the end of the year 8th grade pool party that he carried his weight awkwardly in his pecs, which made them look like the thick bologna hunks hanging in meat markets and earning him the joking name, at least among my friends, of baloney tits. I had crushes on many friends, and regret some of my actions during this time of discovery. I learned a bit later from another acquaintance who was coming out at the same time I was( we talked alot online. it was really helpful to have someone else going through it to) that I wasn't the only one who had done certain, indiscretions shall we say, but I still feel horrible about them.

Even my coming out in the journals is inaccurate. I first say that I think I'm Bi on
12/1/03 because of lingering guilt feelings, even though i knew i was full on gay. I mention that i might come out to a acquaintance because i knew he was gay. the only problem with this is I'm pretty sure i came out to James in October of 03. I could be wrong but i could swear it was still fall( his reaction, in case you're wondering, was "was I not supposed to know that")

In the fall of 00', being unhappy with my high school, my friends situation, my depressive tendencies, and my sexuality, I was going to kill myself. my dad and sister at the time had a really horrible habit( which they kept up later on in life) of asking why I wasn't out with friends, and didn't that make me sad and lonely that i didn't go hang out with people on weekends. Most of my grade school friends had gone to the other High school, and my mom didn't want me to transfer. I had a date- the 19th of November. I was going to jump off the parking structure by the Varsity shop in downtown Birmingham. My plan was to tell my parents i was meeting friends there, because Birmingham was were everyone hung out, and after years of my sister going there they wouldn't suspect anything of it, and would probably be happy to take me there. I practiced getting over the fear by falling of my roof. These efforts usually sucked because I wouldn't jump. I ended up sitting on the roof and pushing off, then slanting sideways so i fell lengthwise and rolled. I remember landing on the same leg three times, and by the third time it hurt so much i stopped and went on the couch so i could lie down and not bend the leg.

I don't know if i would have gone through with it for real, but the DAY before my parents confronted me and said they decided that It's probably best that I transferred because I seemed really depressed. there are a few little drawings in my journal, 2 that I can find, that rate my happiness to depression by how close i get to the edge of a building that was supposed to resemble U of D. In case you can't read it( my handwriting is horrible.) the top heading is "Measure of my Mental Health Friday 17th. my little guy is saying "help me I'm falling". the lower one says "Measure of mental Health as of 10:00 Saturday 18th." I apparently didn't think that it was weird that at the other end of the scale where my stick figure is screaming "I'm so happy", I was still falling off the building.

I told my mom about 2 years later that I had almost killed myself, because she was being a giant bitch on the way to a funeral and kept saying she was "disappointed in me' about something over and over again. She and my dad basically shrugged their shoulders and went on. My sister, being a college freshman who had just had lots of warnings about suicide during orientation, found out when she came home for something, and the next time she came back she had a ton of pamphlets on why not to kill yourself. By then i was fine but i thanked her because she was seriously worried and it was the thought that counted anyway.




The whole point of this is, who the fuck was I writing these Journals for? It's obviously not to record what has happened, since omit most heavy things. It's not to get my feelings out( like i use these for now) since I didn't ever talk to the journals about my sexuality until i came out to people. I don't want to get rid of them since they chronicle other things correctly, but it's just really weird to go back and read about girls who i pretended to have crushes on, without mentioning Matt, or Joseph, or Jason, or Giuseppe, or Rob, or the kids in high school who i used to spend hours, while bored, scoring in a giant Tournament Style graph to see who i thought was hottest at Rice. I didn't actually chronicle 60 percent of the emotions I had to deal with. It enrages me that I would keep a journal and not actually tell the truth in it. Now i want to be able to look back and read what was actually going on in my head, and not about Laura fucking Dadeppo( no offense Laura Dadeppo, I only have fond memories of you. my journal suggests that there was more going on. there wasn't).

I came out, in my opinion, officially on a retreat full of 40 16-18 year olds and 3 teachers @ the end of March. They were going to try and organize one last retreat before the year ended, and I volunteered to be a student leader. We were allowed to pick 2 songs that would play before and after our speech. My journal and the lies in it were going to be a central part of my speech, and Ben Folds Smoke was going to be my closing song. They couldn't get enough kids to merit a last Kairos before graduation, so i never got to make my speech. I really wish I had, and been able to get this off my chest years ago. It also would have been concise.