Suzanna Danna

I need a new banner.

I just renewed my Gold membership for Diaryland and I’m pretty stoked. It has almost been a year and I can’t believe it. A full year of my life in a journal. I am almost proud. I have always wanted a diary. I just haven’t had the moxie to back up my over inflated sense of, “This time I’m really gonna do it!”

I’ve purchased the Mead Composition books before. I’ve asked for the cute diary with a lock for Christmas. I have written down dreams, ideas and resolutions. But I have never stuck with it.

The Mead Composition books were too small; they did not hold enough pages. The cute diary with the non-Mom-proof locks was always forgotten about after a week or so. Anything else I have written down has been saved on a long lost floppy disk or written with such anal retentive insecurities that it sounded like I was not a young woman with a large imagination and a vocabulary to match but a tiny Amish* man with no needs, wants, dreams or thoughts of his own.

*Please read for your entertainment this entry from Miss Doxie about her conversation with her sister. This slays me. If you have a sister with a great sense of humor, this will make you pee a little. Yes, it does tie into the Amish. Hush. Go read it. I’ll wait.

I have always listened to my parents. I listened a little too much and took things too literally for my own good. I’ll go into this more later but the thing that is relevant was the admonition to “Never write something down that you don’t want published.”

Thank you Mommy. I should have listened to you when I was young and sort of A.D.D. about leaving certain steamy love letters (that I received from my then boyfriend) lying around. In your room. On Your Floor! AFTER PLAYING ATARI WITH SAID BOYFRIEND!!!

Ok, that last sentence didn’t really need all caps. I just got carried away with the importance of ending the paragraph on a big TA DA!

Yes, I did leave love letters that I received on the floor. Or on my desk in my room. Or in my purse. Crazy me. If I knew better, I would have burned the notes and letters. I would have forgone the urge to write down dreams, prayers, wishes and bits of creative fancy. As it was, I just wrote down sterilized things I thought about. Passing fancies or lists of things I wanted to do in the future. A list that always included “lose weight”. I stopped writing creatively and boiled any emotion out of my writing so nothing could be pinned on me. So that I couldn’t be blamed for anything.

Why so paranoid? I think it comes with being Baptist. All of the guilt of Catholicism, yet none of the Saints! Whata slogan!

I was young and dumb and not all that hyper about keeping things to myself. I had a very loose sense of the word privacy and my parent’s enabled me to live virtually boundary free. In both the physical and emotional senses. For example: I did not have a lock on my door to my room and was questioned when it was closed. I was in a safe environment and there was no danger in the house. In my mother’s words, “If you think you need to hide something, you probably don’t need to be doing it.” A closed bedroom door was a sure hint that you were hiding something in her mindset. Thank goodness the bathroom door didn’t have the same stigma attached to it.

I know I am getting older when I see some wisdom to this. Not the closed-door thing. Because if I ever tried to force that issue with my future son or daughter, I am sure they would sneak out at night and run away just like I did. I am talking about the “If you think you need to hide something, you probably don’t need to be doing it.”

I just think that in my parent’s case it may have been taken a bit to the extreme.

I know I wasn’t supposed to be receiving steamy love letters at that age, full of info on what said boyfriend wanted to do to me. That is WAY to young to be that cheesy and a little gross.

Even after my father called said boyfriend into the den to talk to him. “So, ya little roughneck. What exactly is it that you want to do to my youngest daughter?” [I’m paraphrasing of course, I’m sure the conversation included a threat and the word ‘rubba-nuts’ in it.] I still kept those notes and letters out of a need to feel important. To know that someone cared enough to write words of feeling down during Algebra II.

How sad. A cute little girl, or young woman, needing to keep reminders of emotional attachments with boyfriends and even regular friends. As if to say, No, really, I am wanted and needed. See? Look at all of these notes I have. People wrote these to me. I’m not too fat. Even though I did lose my virginity at a very early age, I am still respected and wanted. Somebody wants me. I’m not a slut. I’m Not! Nobody thinks I’m a freak even though I’m taller than everyone else. No one thinks I’m weird when I laugh a little too loud and manically trying to be the life of the party.

Ya’ll… I kept a garbage bag full of notes until I graduated from college.

Now I know that I don’t need those notes to feel important; to mark a milestone of how somebody felt about me, or how I made them feel. I don’t need those notes to remember a special moment about people from my past. I don’t need those notes to believe in myself or to make sure that I remember that I was good enough for that person at that moment and that maybe I could be good enough again.

I still have a few. Mister and I went through them when we were packing my apartment before we got married. We read them together and “awwww’d” over the particularly sweet ones and scrunched up our noses at the psycho ones. I keep the few that I have now out of sentimental reasons as opposed to necessity.

Mister does write me notes now and again. Sweet and kind notes that fill me up with warmth and happiness. The biggest difference is that now I don’t have to rely on notes for fill that empty spot. I have grown up considerable over the past ten years. I have grown into my skin. I like me. My ass… now, that’s another story. Heh. Seriously, I had to grow into seeing the best in me. It took a lot of therapy, a lot of beer and some serious face time with people like Mister, my sister and Stacey the Possum Slayer .

With the process of self-actualization and dealing with and acknowledging my faults weakness and my strengths, I have slowly but surely come around to the writing side of the table again. A big step was this diary. I have written some pretty painful things down on these pages and they may be something that I don’t want published. But… by gum, this is me. I will be 32 this year. I have a wonderful life, husband, family, cat and job. I am not apologizing for myself anymore.

My tummy is poochy, my feet are pretty, I pee when I sneeze, my grammar is atrocious and I put my pants on backwards last week.

How you doin?