The Bedroom of Stifling Nostalgia

It's Day 9 of 10 that I'm spending Chez Parents in good old G-land on the opposite coast. Upstate NY really is beautiful in the summer. The warm breeze stirring the pine boughs and rustling the lush, green grass is almost enough to make one forget the dismal Northeastern winters, which stretch from November all the way to April. More than anything else this past week, I've been enjoying my parents' big, quiet backyard, especially the shade of the maple tree, which was "my" tree through childhood and which now is large and full enough to provide a pleasant spot for reading.

The expansive shade of the maple tree is far, far more soothing than the comparatively oppressive space contained within the four walls of my childhood bedroom on the second floor of the house. This room, with its faded orange carpeting and very nineteen-seventies collage-style wallpaper, has changed little since I left it for good in the spring of 1997. The canopy bed is gone, the posters honoring the band INXS and various NY and VT ski resorts have vanished, and the stuffed animals have relocated to the attic, but there still sits a full bookcase on one wall and a bulletin board replete with high-school relics on another. The closet, though thoroughly (and courageously) sifted through and organized a few years back by my mom, still contains boxes of papers, notebooks, letters, and diaries from what were evidently my emotionally turbulent middle- and high-school years. It was these boxes I approached today, at the gentle urging of my parents, in an attempt to weed out those items that could be discarded once and for all.

The thought of opening these boxes and coming face-to-face with my younger self filled me with dread. Last time I did this, I think a full year ago, I came across a paper I wrote about how, when I grew up, I wanted to do work that focused on helping women with eating disorders, or something similarly counseling-related. (Reading that made me feel a bit guilty about having recently joined the ranks of Corporate America.) I cracked open my massive junior-year English project titled "The Physique Mystique," a study of contemporary literature with women's body image as its focus. I read a journal entry from the same time that explored my choices as a young woman on the brink of adulthood. I was surprised by what seemed like an intelligent, idealistic, thoughtful young me. The surprise quickly dissolved into panic, though. I wondered if anyone would describe the current me as intelligent, idealistic, or thoughtful. I wondered if I'd squandered any sort of potential I displayed in high school. I felt sick and anxious trying to determine if high-school me would be proud of adult me. In the fretful aftermath of that closet clean-out, I decided it was time to make a few changes in my respectable but unremarkable adult life. I started writing again, and a few months later, began volunteering on Saturdays. Small steps, certainly. But taking initiative and action, however minor, has helped a bit in keeping the "What am I doing with my life?" anxiety at bay.

So. Anyway. Today I was again faced with the daunting task of reliving bits and pieces of my adolescence and judging how my thoughts and ideas from back then measure up against the life I'm living today. Daunting, indeed. These situations are always greatly exacerbated by my lifelong propensity for writing everything down. I've kept a handful of diaries over the years, and I tend not to throw out letters, notes, and drawings that seem meaningful at the time. Everything's documented. It's all there on paper, and it often makes me cringe.

Today I found quite a bit of incriminating personal writing from my adolescent and late-teen years. Among the yellowed papers was a word-processed self-improvement plan that I vaguely remember typing up in a fervor one college summer. It included everything from "Apply skin medication EVERY DAY!" to "Reduce number of bingeing incidents to zero." I also found, presumably from high school, a scribbled diary entry titled "People Who Never Fail at Anything," with a list of 20 or so names listed beneath. Some of the names are repeated. Many of them are kids I went to high school with who got better grades than me, were involved in twice the activities I was, and were accepted to Ivy-League schools. Some of them were good friends of mine. Even one of my grandmothers made the list. On the next page, in the same ink and feverish scrawl, is a paragraph about how talentless, stupid, and ugly I believed I was in comparison to those on the list. Ugh. Painful! I threw that out and made a mental note to Google a few of the people on the list of whom I'd lost track.

Among the other, less emotionally wrenching artifacts were a few fairly embarrassing diary entries in which I'd listed in numerous ways how much I loved or was bored by my boyfriends; there was one particularly silly entry detailing how elated I was to be asked to D's junior prom. It was incredibly goofy, yet also kind of sweet. I mean, I really don't get excited like that anymore about most things. I also found some drawings that a long-ago coworker from an old summer job had covertly delivered to me in the office whenever he wanted to have lunch, as well as writing authored by myself and my classmates from the overnight, week-long field trips to Nature's Classroom taken in fifth and seventh grade.

So I guess what I'm saying here is that each time I enter my childhood bedroom and begin sorting through my old things, I'm reminded of the person I once was. Sometimes I get a kick and a laugh out of it; other times I'm disturbed by what I find. In both cases, though, I'm prompted to reflect on my life as it stands now and to compare it to what I imagined my adult life would be.

So, how do I measure up this go-round? Not bad, actually. It seems I've evolved a bit from the self-absorbed person I was ten or twelve years ago, and I now rarely compare my accomplishments, or lack thereof, to others'. I don't think I'm talentless, or stupid, or ugly...just lazy and a bit unorganized, with too many interests and not enough "stick-to-itiveness," to borrow a word from one of the Nature's Classroom writings. When faced with the opportunity to daydream under a shady maple tree or force the contents of a closet into some kind of order, I'll always choose the maple tree.