Reflections on a younger self…

So, after reading roughly 3,000 handwritten pages of my own writing I have come to several conclusions.

1. I was WAAAAAAY more knowledgeable at the age of 11 than I thought I was. At 11 I had connected the fact that trauma and abuse leads to alcoholism. Now, as I grew up in Seattle during the 80s and 90s, maybe its not such a stretch that I understood addiction, but I don’t remember really understanding alcoholism at the time. So far as I remember I thought of drugs and alcohol as two separate things.

2. My handwriting changes with the wind, time, thought, and mood. I had handwriting so perfect it could have been done with a typewriter. I had loopy and loose writing. I had cramped crabby writing. I wrote backwards (from right to left with the letters backwards) for no apparent reason and at random points. I wrote upside down. I wrote in cursive. I wrote in block letters. I wrote in regular printing. I wrote in denalian. Basically, if it’s a writing style, I wrote in it.

3. My eyes were MUCH better back then than they are now. I wrote in the palest of yellows on white paper and pale orange and green on white paper. I remember thinking that teachers were nuts for asking me not to write in those pens because they were perfectly bright and clear.

4. While I may not have understood how to phrase things smoothly, I always understood plot and inter-character relationships.

When I explained that reading and writing upside down and backwards and such makes no difference to me and that I often don’t notice it, Linds looked at me like a loony person. Somehow, I think I could be my own weird episode of Fringe (brilliant show, btw).