Things I Loved Lately

/things I cried at lately

Hello, hi, happy Saturday!

If I have timed this right, and also my diary is correct, this is a Saturday for which I have no plans to go anywhere. I will be writing like a storm and packing all my books into boxes and mainlining sugar.

I was thinking about sugar, and in particular in particular, some unbelievably nice tahini snickerdoodles I remembered making a couple years ago. Did I write about those? I thought. I googled it. I did.

My heart leapt. (So many good things I make I forget to write down anywhere proper.)

Then I read it.

What is weird about this newsletter is that I have now been keeping it long enough that it functions as more of a diary than my actual diary.

My actual diary, an ongoing series of notebooks I have been alternately preserving and burning since 2008, is part to-do list, part sketchbook, part general work-day jottings, swirled wildly through with a not-insignificant number of pages of unfiltered pure emotion. If anyone ever read these notebooks, I would die. They would not enjoy it: that’s my one comfort. They would not enjoy any of it! And they would not enjoy the aftermath, where I would have to explain to them that keeping a diary, for me at least, is not so much about what I actually think as trying to find out what I actually think: it’s about trying on a variety of emotional states to see if they feel right. Am I angry? Am I sad? Am I hungry? All of the above, or just the last one? This is also what therapy is for, for me: it’s a sandbox for feelings before I do anything as stupid as an action.

Which makes them, even unburned, not that helpful a record of any specific time in my life. The lists are always surprising, especially when they are indistinguishable over many years (deadlines! emails! laundry!), but the emotions not so much: it’s like looking at a paint palette instead of the finished picture.