I finished organizing the house this weekend. My bedroom is clean. The living room is clean. The kitchen is clean. The upstairs *closets* are clean.and in the process of organizing, I went through a few boxes of old paper...and was ambushed yet again by the past.
I have letters I've saved from 1988 on through about 1997--love letters, letters from people who were just writing to say hi, letters from the time I spent offline after college. Reams of paper, much of it from people I'll never see again.
I also came across photos. Pictures of M, a guy I had a crush on in high school. A picture taken at the House of Aluminum that I don't remember taking (with my ex and his best friend in it). Pictures of another ex that I didn't know I had. Pictures of the Unified Program people who I spent so much of my first two years of college with.
In one of them, we're getting ready to go to a production of Billboards, the first weekend I'd met Chris. We're all dressed up. R's just said something amusing and has this smug little look on her face, and B (her then-boyfriend) is hiding behind her hair. The rest of us are looking over at R with amused smiles, except Chris, who's been caught with his head thrown back, laughing.
I remember that night, vividly. I was a couple of days away from being 19. I was still a technical virgin. And that night, I confessed to Chris that I was bisexual. It was the first time I'd actually told anyone out loud. I'd never spoken the words out loud to myself, though I'd typed them a number of times as I'd talked with a select few online friends about it.
I was afraid he'd get squicked. I was afraid he'd leave. I was afraid...I'm not sure exactly what I was afraid of, but I was afraid of it, whatever it was.
And he took it in good grace and we moved on with our lives. He didn't abandon me.
That night, I learned an important lesson in remaining true to myself. I learned that I could actually be who I was and what I was and there were people in the world who wouldn't reject me because of it.
Other pictures tell the same sorts of stories: a picture of me caught reading with the mess of preparing for college spread out around me. A picture of me and T in her dorm room, cuddled close together. A picture of Misha and I at my parents' house, she with a insouciant look on her face, me grinning slyly from under my bangs.
Pictures of the RVW people in the cubicle we had in the Student Activities Center. Pictures of people from the Carleton summer writing program I attended.
And pictures of me. Pictures of me during the time in my life I have no memories of, pictures that I don't have any context for because I don't remember who took them, or when. I look at the pictures, all of them from a time when I thought I was the ugliest person alive, and I realize, hey, I was actually pretty cute back then.
I am full of understanding and sympathy for the teenager I was.
I have evidence, now.
there was a lot more here, but after I started uncovering some really painful stuff, I decided to make it private for the time being while I talk about it with the person it concerns.
