Publishing my diary
an experiment in the present tense.
It’s diary month.
This September, I am experimenting with writing more diary style essays for Moxie. These are drawn from my real, old journals and contemporaneous notes I take throughout the week. I hope you enjoy them. They’re less structured and more in the moment than most of my writing has been— typically, I try to process a feeling before I write about it. Feelings change day to day and that means the tone of these posts will too. Let’s get messy (in a literary sense.) I love you and I’m eager for your feedback about this! xx HS
What the fuck.
It’s the thought that comes to mind as I drive alone near the beach and when I lay awake at night. What the fuck. The road that led me from chaos in Waco, TX to a tidy bungalow in South Florida winds through a marriage and divorce, eating disorders, failed careers, semi-successful ones. There are casualties and unlikely heroes. I cannot believe that everything that has happened in the last thirty-three years did happen. And that it happened to me. Was I the woman who made all of these choices? Do you ever feel like your life played out on screen? Like you are, perhaps, the heroine in a novel you did not write? Or more probably the antagonist in it? Late at night, existence feels surreal. I try to pinpoint the moment where everything went— depending on my mood—wrong or right. I am annoyed with myself because I know that feeling this way— as though my life is unbelievable— is entitled and incorrect. Is there anything more believable than a chaotic wanna-be creative type making a series of predictable but impulsive decisions and emerging from the wreckage shocked to find herself holding the knife? I drink lukewarm camomile tea and let the memories wash over me whenever I cannot sleep.
Thankfully, I sleep better than I used to.
This is the second time in my life that I have ever felt a sense of unbridled freedom. I am obliged to nothing except myself. This time freedom is terrifying not comforting. How could I possibly be trusted with this responsibility? I am so irresponsible.
The last time I felt this way, I was newly twenty-five years old, newly single, newly self-employed.