Personal journal reveals right path

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/08/2021 (1642 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have a huge, overflowing bin of old journals in my basement. Worn-out books with diary entries, cringey poetry, and lots of doodles, stickers and pictures cut out from old magazines and glued in collages.

The books date back to my angsty teenage years in the ‘90s, well before we could shout our thoughts and opinions into the voice of the internet.

A deep dive into these personal archives is always met with a wave of nostalgia mixed with a twang of embarrassment. For one thing, I’ve used “your” when it should be “you’re” in nearly all of my writing for most of my life. It’s not a big deal, but I can’t help but smile at all of the posts blatantly riddled with typos and grammatical errors.

The entry that always gets me is from around 2008. It’s an old, pixelated photo of myself that I printed and glued onto a page of an old journal. There I am, taking a selfie in a mirror in the washroom at the University of Winnipeg. My hair is a shaggy, shoulder-length bob, and I have thick, black eyeliner on. I am using my old burgundy flip phone to take the photo (this was long before I had a smartphone), and I have a look on my face — serious but posing, and trying way too hard doing it. I wrote, “Shelley, your exactly where you are supposed to be” on the photo in black marker.

Ugh. So close. The sentiment was spot on, but every time I leaf through that particular journal, I chuckle at the error. That said, I was exactly where I was supposed to be, because the University of Winnipeg was where I learned how to properly use “your” and “you’re.”

I was rummaging though the box of old books again last week. I found a journal I hadn’t looked at in who knows how long. I leafed though it, recoiling at many of the embarrassing entries, and then found one I had completely forgot about. My eyes widened, and my heart melted for the version of me who wrote it.

It was dated April 16, 2011.

“Thoughts: At this moment in life I am at a place that I never thought I would be… I’ve worked at BOTH of Winnipeg’s Dailies (newspapers) and the hottest radio station in the city… If it all ended tomorrow I could honestly say ‘I arrived.’ Sounds so cheesy, but I never thought I’d get out of that life… Yet, here I am.’”

At the bottom, I cut out stickers into letters that said “NEVER STOP.”

Looking back at that post felt like I was reading someone else’s story. I guess I was, in a way. Back then, I had just graduated from the Creative Communications program at Red River College. I had ‘worked’ (that’s a strong word for a handful of short work placements and internships over the course of two years) at two newspapers and a radio station, and I didn’t even have a job in the communications field yet. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered is I got to that point in my life and had accomplished something big. As the journal entry said, “I arrived.”

A decade later, I still keep a journal with doodles, stickers and pictures glued from old magazines in my bag. I write my thoughts, and cringey poems, and I make lists of the things I’d like to do in my life. Sometimes I take things in my life for granted, including the dream I worked so hard for back then, so I’m grateful to stumble on reminders like that journal entry.

The Winnipeg Free Press gives me a piece of space in every Monday’s newspaper to share my thoughts, and we recently passed the one-year mark. If the kid who wrote that post in 2011 could see how far we’ve come, I don’t know if she’d believe it.

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @ShelleyAcook