there are notes in my phone that I don't remember writing....
Some are grocery lists. Some are half-finished ideas. Some are reminders that made perfect sense at the time and absolutely none like a year later.
And then there are the ones that feel like they were written by a stranger.
This week, I opened a note from May 28, 2024. The day before my son's birthday, might I add. A few weeks after I learned that the person I loved had been lying to me.
I had completely forgotten the note existed.
So naturally.... I read it out loud on my podcast.
You can listen to the full episode, Diary Entry #052824, on Spotify here.
another version of me
Reading those words felt like meeting an older version of myself, even though she was actually younger.
She was exhausted. She was angry. She was trying to negotiate with reality.
She kept asking one question.
How?
How could you do this?
How do I forgive? How do I move on?
How do I trust again?
I remember believing that if I could just find the right answer,
everything would click back into place.
It never did. Life kept moving anyway.
memory
is a terrible witness...
When we're hurting, our brains rewrite history constantly.
Bad days feel endless. Good memories become suspicious.
The worst moments get softened just enough that we start wondering if they were really that bad.
Loneliness is especially convincing.
A couple of weeks ago, after my cat Basil passed away,
I was sitting alone in my apartment. For the smallest moment,
I wondered if I should let my ex back into my life.
Grief has a way of making familiar pain seem easier than unfamiliar loneliness.
Then I found that note.
getting out wasn't the vision
The woman who wrote it didn't know she would eventually leave.
She didn't know she would have her own apartment.
She didn't know she would survive.
She was simply documenting what it felt like to exist inside betrayal.
Reading her words reminded me of something I had almost forgotten.
I already knew. I just wasn't ready to listen.
journals preserve evidence
We usually talk about journaling as a way to preserve memories.
I think it preserves evidence. Evidence that your instincts were real. Evidence that your boundaries existed before you could enforce them.
Evidence that healing wasn't as clean as your memory later tried to make it.
When I read the note, I wasn't surprised by how angry I sounded...
I was actually surprised by how accurately I described what my body already knew.
There were images I would never write today.
A teething ocean.
A mouth stolen by the tide.
A nuclear boiler room.
None of it was polished.
None of it was written for an audience.
It was written because my brain needed somewhere safe to put feelings that were too heavy to carry all day.
They were my literal survival, my only lifeline in the moment.
time changes the
narrator, hopefully.
Two years later, I don't hear that note the same way.
I don't feel trapped while reading it. I feel compassion.
She was sitting across from the person who hurt her while secretly typing paragraphs into her phone just to stay grounded.
She thought she was processing.
Looking back, she was documenting the case against staying.
That's the strange thing about time.
The version of you living through the hardest season rarely understands what they're creating. Sometimes you're writing instructions for someone you haven't become yet.
write anyway, okay?
Write when you're angry. Write when you're embarrassed.
Write when you're convinced nobody should ever read it.
Especially then., okay?
Your future self won't need perfect grammar.
They won't care if it sounds dramatic.They won't judge the metaphors.
They'll be looking for proof. That they weren't imagining it.
Proof that they weren't crazy. Proof that they've come farther than they realized.
If you've been keeping notes for years, go read one today.
You might discover that someone has been rooting for you this whole time.
It just happens to be an younger version of yourself.
