Notes App

I keep remembering all of these moments I experienced when I was younger that are still shaping my identity.

Sometimes I see people I used to know within people I’m beginning to know. How somebody made me feel when I was little affects how I treat the people that I care about, and will for the rest of my life. Why didn’t these earlier relationships feel like they mattered back then?

I remember fantasizing about being 23 when I was 11. I wish I knew that everything I lived through then would eventually come back to me.

So much of my early adult life has been imitating experiences my parents made for me when I was little, so a lot of my days feel like deja vu.

I wonder if agreeableness was something I taught myself so I could try to control how accepted I am.

There are people I’m somehow still linked to whose validation online feels vital, even though we weren’t close when we lived in the same state. I like who you are at a distance. I wonder if we could’ve been best friends.

Whenever I see women in their 20s with worn Vera Bradley luggage, I can imagine who they were in middle school.

I have profited off of transparency but still have trouble understanding the deepest parts of myself. A lot of what I thought I was feels inauthentic now, which is probably just a natural part of changing. How do I know if I’m changing in a good way?

I find it easy and exciting to learn about how people feel. Was I ever really being open about my own feelings? Or am I a lot more understood than I feel that I am? Maybe to everybody else it is obvious that I am half-shut, or I’m extremely easy to sum up. I hope it’s extremely difficult to sum me up.

Asking other people the same questions I am too afraid to figure out personally might be a part of my own self-discovery. At 24 I’ll try to know the answers before I ask the questions.

I once read in an astrology chart that my best life won’t come until I’m 30, that I need to stop myself from following paths people expect me to follow, and that I should grow into my uniqueness even if it ostracizes me a bit. I believe in other people’s perceptions of me, and I believe in the prophecies of a birth chart. Maybe that’s all there is to believing in astrology. I should start believing in things I think are true about myself. I want to know every religion.

I think I’ll be wrong about the things I think about pretty often. Should that make me less inclined to share what I think?

The other day, my mom explained to me why my sister and I are complete opposites. She is loud, and I am quiet. She has strong opinions and will be at the center of discussions, while I will be on the sidelines, dropping commentary when I can fit a couple words in. I used to think I was loud and opinionated. I have no idea who I am to other people. I think I’d like to do something that changes someone’s life. I often get stuck in feeling bored of my normalcy, forgetting that keeping myself stuck is what’s making me feel very plain. I like plain, old things. I surround myself with creamy white walls and refuse to buy a couch. I don’t hang the art that I buy. I wear the same pants every day of the week. I still wonder why other people might see me as plain, and then I realize that I craft the impression they have of me with every choice I make. And I think, isn’t it so much more exciting to look plain and surprise somebody, than to look surprising and actually be as simple as the walls in my apartment? And who is the judge of my own plainness? Me. So, if I want to be, I am the coolest person to exist. If I really aspire towards it, I am the most boring girl I’ve ever met. Something I’ve become really interested in this summer is becoming a good storyteller. The only problem with that aspiration is that I forget things unless I write them down.

I made a list of the things I catch myself doing in my Notes app. They’re not stories, but if they sound interesting enough I’ll start to write about the rest of my day. What are you to yourself? I am loud and opinionated and unfeminine and cynical. But that’s only because when I realize you might think I’m quiet and passive and girly and positive, it doesn’t feel like enough. Is it wrong to want to be everything?

I should start doing things for myself more.

Sometimes, I get so bored that I scroll through my friend’s Venmo activities. There lies a whole other human language. We are not as far removed from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs as I previously thought.