She Knew

Movie/music Monday

I posted recently about volume 7 of my journals. At least I think I did. That volume took place over only two months of my sophomore year of high school. April and May of 1998 to be exact. I was 15 years old and for those two months, my obsession with three boys made me insufferable. Good grief! It has been like pulling teeth transcribing this volume. Fifteen year old Sarah was pretty annoying! I have two short entries left to transcribe and then I will gladly put this one back on the shelf and start on number 8. Number 7 is ending just as summer break that year is starting. I don’t remember that much of anything exciting happening during my 11th grade year. I seem to recall it was fairly uneventful. It’s my senior year that gives me anxiety because of how badly it went off the rails. But I’m looking forward to those journals because that’s when my first mental illness diagnosis came, as a result of all that happened that year.

Yesterday, I was working my way through yet another round of entries that I had flagged. I stopped to go pick up dinner for Josh and me. Every time I get in the car, I plug in my phone and usually put on my “Random Awesomeness” playlist. That playlist contains songs from all the other playlists too (except for the Christmas one). This includes my “High School Nostalgia” playlist. I created that one with the intention of listening to it while I worked on my book. To help me relive the vibe from back then.

But when I put on my usual playlist and a bunch of songs from my high school playlist kept coming up, I had to skip all of them. I felt the nostalgia and I also felt the annoyance of my younger self. I know she doesn’t stay that way forever, and it was definitely a phase she was going through, being as boy crazy as she was, but yesterday, I needed a break from her.

However, I thought it would be interesting to share some of what’s on my high school playlist. I can’t remember if I’ve shared this one before. If I have, there are definitely more songs on it now. I keep thinking of new ones to add. According to Apple Music, there are 75 songs totaling 5 hours and 16 minutes. Here are a couple screenshots of the first 20 or so songs:

I will say this though…for as annoying as teenage me was in this particular time period, she was a damn good writer for her age! I copied and pasted a few lines from this journal that made me stop in awe at the way she described herself and others.

• I’m gonna go now and take a shower because all of a sudden I feel dirty. I feel like scrubbing away my past and starting new. (I wrote this after describing a phone call from one of the boys I was obsessed with who told me some awful truths about one of the other boys I was obsessed with. I decided here that I was going to move on from both of them. Pretty sure I didn’t actually move on until after I graduated high school two years later, but this description was still pretty good).
• He looks like the freak he believes himself to be. (This is my favorite one. I was describing one of the boys I was obsessed with—the one up above who told me some ugly things about the other boy—when he cut his hair super short and dyed it a tacky yellow blonde. Not the kindest thing to say about him. But I was 15. I felt this statement with my whole heart).

This is one of those times I wish I could go back and tell my younger self what a good writer she is and how she should never stop writing in her journals because they’re going to be important one day. But I don’t need to go back and tell her that. She knew. I know she did. I have all the journals to prove it. And now that I think of it, she’ll have a bunch of ribbons in the 11th grade to prove that she’s a good writer. Yeah, she definitely knew.

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