memory jog #2

things i want to achieve in my lifetime, 2007

This is the second installment of Memory Jog: a series where I collect my memories scattered across the Internet by focusing on one post at a time. You can read the first installment here.

my high school bedroom

This weekend, I went shopping in search of a dress to wear to a wedding next month. Somehow, at 34, I still have not acquired an adequate cocktail or nicer-than-average dress, so there’s a lot riding on this. In my hunt for the perfect dress, I stopped in a store and got recognized by one of the employees. When she mentioned she knew who I was, I asked if she knew me through Tumblr, and she added that she knew me from LiveJournal.

Whenever someone mentions that they followed me on LiveJournal, I feel like they know me more intimately than most people. This isn’t actually true, but it feels like interacting with someone I went to high school with. It’s the kind of intimacy I feel with someone who knew me as Amalia (before publicly going by Molly), or someone who met me before I quit drinking.

I kept a LiveJournal pretty regularly from the ages of 14 to 20, eventually ditching it for my Tumblr account in 2009. Going back and looking through my old LiveJournal entries puts me in a weird headspace. It’s hard to articulate, because my adolescence was pretty frictionless, and I feel thankful that I kept these records. It’s sort of like looking at a photo of yourself that someone else took, from an angle you’re not used to seeing yourself from. Maybe this analogy doesn’t work. I took the picture. Maybe that’s what makes it more jarring.

I went looking for an entry written on January 7, 2007 at 8:08PM. I was 17 years old, three weeks from my 18th birthday. I believe this post was private, because there are no comments on it. It reads: