A friend of mine made fun of me recently for making everything into an anniversary. I don’t think this is my fault. Facebook is always reminding me, On This Day. Instagram has created so many hashtag holidays I swear it is always National Something I Love Day {Dog, Donuts, Ice Cream, Best Friends, Siblings, &c &c &c}. I live in a time when everything is being memorialized, and so no one will remember anything. If everything feels special, nothing will feel special. Sometimes I look back at those On This Day posts and I think, oh yeah, that was a thing in my life. Sometimes I feel like a stranger to myself. Especially in September.
But I think I started this kind of reflecting back on cycles of the earth around the sun well before Facebook and Instagram took over. I kept a journal regularly for nearly a decade before I switched completely to documenting my life publicly on the internet. Back then, I would look back at whatever the current day was X number of years ago. If it was August 10th, I would look back at all the August 10ths for which I’d written journal entries. Because I wrote every day, sometimes multiple times a day, there was a lot to work with.
I liked watching myself grow up in my own words. But I hated seeing how juvenile I’d been, and I hated even more knowing I’d reflect back on whatever moment it was when I had that thought and think, wow it was so juvenile to be worried about having been juvenile. I am, if nothing else, a perpetual cycle of myself. I think you’ve always been the same Ali, someone I love said to me this summer. I think that’s true. You’d think that means I know how to trust myself now, but I don’t.
Mostly my journal reminds me of another thing someone I love said to me this summer. That I love hard. Sometimes I like to be reminded of this. Sometimes I don’t.
One thing that happens is that I’m able to see certain truths about myself. That I love the tedium of a day, of a life. That I hate September. That I am always trying to be better. Just now, I pulled one line from each of my journal entries on this day for the past 11 years. I stopped posting regularly around summer of 2012 right before I moved to LA and R left and J died, so there are no September entries after that. There are probably September 12th entries on this blog tho. I always gotta be saying something somewhere.
*{{Note that in 2005, I am 17 years old.}}
2005: What the fuck is it with everyone and thinking you’re all so goddam smart.
2006: I keep going through it over and over and over in my head.
2007: And Bright Eyes is tomorrow night but I am not going, sigh.
2008: NO ENTRY
2009: I said, it’s cold, you have to come home because it’s cold and I can’t do it.
2010: This absence is filled with love.
2011: NO ENTRY
2012: NO ENTRY
2013: NO ENTRY
2014: NO ENTRY
2015: NO ENTRY
2016: NO ENTRY
Oh but two September 12ths ago I did adopt this animal, so there’s that.