My True North
I wrote my first Livejournal entry on April 7, 2001. I was 16 and blissfully ignorant about many things. A quick glance at those first few entries was enough to make me cringe and click over to a different tab. But like many things that elicit that sort of response, I return and I remember what it was like to be a 16-year-old girl who had no other place to put her feelings. It wasn’t my first online journal and it wouldn’t be the last either.
I started it at a time when all the girls I had been friends with in school were driving, getting serious boyfriends, and just generally participating in activities that were forbidden in my household. If things had been rough as a child who only wanted to go to a slumber party a few miles away, they got much, much worse.
It is both a blessing and a curse to romanticize everything in your life. For me, at that particular moment, it may have been my savior. But I was a long way from viewing my situation like that. Isolation was a major part of my raising, whether it was intentional or not. There were two places I went-school and church. The first was 10 miles away in the small town my original school consolidated with in the early 1990s. Famous for inspiring Footloose, it was far from the sort of metropolis I dreamed of visiting. The other place I went was 40 miles away in a somewhat larger town. These were the people I was supposed to befriend and maintain relationships with because they were believers and that made them better suited to be my close friends. It was a tall order when I only saw them twice each week and they all had their groups of school friends, circles with steely perimeters I was never able to infiltrate.
The phone briefly redeemed me, until no one stayed home anymore. Football games, dragging Main, driving to Pauls Valley to see a movie. All things I wasn’t allowed to do. I pulled up my hair, closed the window to my tower, and connected to the dial-up.
They were waiting and they were kind. A group of young women who had taught themselves to code html and through numbers and symbols and text had found a way to express themselves in a place where few people were looking. I imagine us now as a secret coven, meeting deep in the woods with our cloaks held tight about us until we reach a clearing where the moon glows bright and we can let our hoods down. Show our faces. Find ourselves in the solace of sisterhood.
I found my voice here. Unsteady at first, this was the log over the stream where I could practice crossing the water without fear of falling too far.
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this is my entry for week 8 of therealljidol. the topic is "my true north". you can vote in the poll here. the rest of the idol entries can be found here.
this topic made me think of a song that i used to listen to often while i would write in my journal all those years ago. you can check out the playlist i made to celebrate that very specific moment in my life here.