The Way I Saw It
When I was 16, I had a charmed life. I lived in Plano, Texas, a sprawling suburb of Dallas, with my younger brother and our parents. I was working part-time at a Cold Stone Creamery, teaching Sunday school at a local synagogue, volunteering weekly with a Planned Parenthood-sponsored theater group and nearly failing AP French 4. I drove my (many!!) friends around in a bright yellow Nissan X-Terra, listened exclusively to pop punk and spent my weekends getting accustomed to the abrasive taste of Smirnoff. It was also the year I started my first blog, The Way I See It, and found my love for the personal narrative.
I re-read The Way I See It recently, expecting to be embarrassed by my past self. Instead, I was exhilarated. It is a more honest demonstration of my character than anything I’ve written since. There is so much angst and so much fear.
I remember my teenage angst vividly. I was struggling with anxiety, and my dad was undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer. But I never explicitly mention either of those things in my blogs — alluding to them but never explaining. “Everyone doesn’t always need to know everything going on. The last three-ish months have been really emotional, but now I know that I can care.” Very cryptic.
Instead, I wrote extensively about my weekend plans, why I loved Shakespeare but hated ketchup, and how lucky I was to have friends that supported me no matter what, despite how “totally messed up” I was. At the time, I thought I was being mysterious because I was private. In actuality, I was mistaking mystery for bravery.
I was mistaking mystery for bravery
Now, I’ve mostly outgrown my anxiety and my dad has been in remission for years. But that teenage angst still feels fresh.
I remember my teenage self as completely fearless — someone that cared little about what others said and even less about what they thought. I remembered this blog as an outlet for my bravado. So I was surprised by how much fear I found hidden in my words, both the cryptic ones and otherwise . Now, I can clearly see the adolescent insecurity I thought I had escaped. Insecurity that presented itself in one simple sentence, repeated at the bottom of roughly 80% of my posts. “As if anyone is even reading this.”
At 16, I threw my words into the dark void of the internet and hoped, begged even, for a response. But in case there wasn’t one, I gave myself an out. “I already know no one is reading this! Joke’s on you!”
The odd thing is, people actually were reading it.
Nearly every post has a comment, and I regularly began my entries with “Hi Kevin!” or “Claire, I’ll call you this weekend!” And yet, I verbalized my fear of obscurity post after post, week after week, for the entire three years I kept up that blog.
If there was one thing I could tell that heavily eye-lined version of myself, I wouldn’t tell her to write more about her problems. You can’t tell a teenager how to feel things. No, if I could tell my 16-year-old self one thing, it would be this: an audience is not what makes you a writer. Writing is what makes you a writer.
I recognize that now, but I’m still not sure I believe it.
In the 7 years since I started that blog, I earned a journalism degree and started writing for a living. I’m still terrified that no one cares. But somewhere along the line, I learned that if I can’t ditch that insecurity, I can defy it. I learned that acknowledging my fears doesn’t make me any less fierce. I learned that my best blogs come from pretending everyone I know will read it, even while my analytics objectively tell me otherwise. I learned that the reason I was always so hungover was because Sonic slushes and raspberry vodka are very sugary, and I wasn’t drinking enough water. That last lesson took a while.
In 7 more years, I hope to read my current blog with the same excitement. In the meantime, I’ll leave teen Kelly with this final piece of advice —
Stop undermining your words. Someone needs to be proud of them, and it needs to be you.
As if she is even reading this.
Kelly Fine is a writer in Boston, where she is either sweating, shivering or tweeting about how hungry she is.
This is the fourth installment of the My Teen Diary series.
