It's a long, long, road.

Yesterday, as part of my ongoing baby steps into packing up the apartment, I decided to weed out some of the detritus that piles up after living in a place too long. Actually, scratch that. This wasn't just junk acquired over my three years in Ottawa, this was junk I've dragged around for all of my twenty-eight years. This was junk my parents asked if I still wanted when they moved a few years ago, stuff I begged for them to keep, crying into the phone on the other side of the country and mourning the loss of the great storage closet that was my childhood home. The biplane I made in eighth grade shop class. The evaluation sheets from countless Kiwanis music festivals. So many adorably awful incarnations of my resume (Graduate of the Red Cross Babysitting Course!). A typewriter-forged list of emergency numbers handed out to all new residents at my all-girls undergraduate college. More medical notes than I care to mention. A newspaper I "published" (ie. glued my own articles over the existing ones on the pages of a 1986 copy of the Hamilton Spectator) featuring an article about a juggler whose friends told him his juggling was bad, ON HIS BIRTHDAY. I could go on, and on, and on. And on.

The worst discoveries, though, were the myriad (legion, even) binders of awful, awful poetry. Don't get me wrong--I'm an avid diarist, and one of my favourite navel-gazing activities is to delve into the archives and re-read my diary from a given year. You know by now that I'm a huge fan of introspection, and I love revisiting the mundane details of my past daily lives. But something about re-reading my angst-ridden, sexually ambiguous, teenage poetry, just makes me die a little inside. It's enough to make me want to time travel back to 1995 and rip the pen out of my metallic-blue-nailed hand out of my fifteen-year-old self and order her not to write any more metaphors about ferris wheels, stabbing, and eating disorders.

I get that sinking feeling of complete and utter embarrassment when I read most of my old creative writing. It's weirdly satisfying, maybe because when you know how just how earnestly lame you once were, you can at least be safe in the notion that you're not quite as bad as you used to be. It's the same masochistic comfort I felt when I read Mortified by David Nadelberg, an absolutely brilliant collection of adolescent diaries and writing that will make you laugh and die all at once. Wear a hooded sweatshirt while you read it, because I promise, you'll be overcome with the urge to pull it up over your head and hide from the reflected shame emanating from the pages. I honestly can't say anything more about this book, other than to beg you to read it. To describe it is to diminish its brilliance. And brilliance is the best word for it, I think, because really, that's the beauty of pre-teen and teen writing--when you're that age, you honestly believe you're a stifled genius exiled in an unforgiving world, which validates your decision to write a sonnet about barfing up a box of Nilla wafers with all the plucky flair of a modern-day Anne Frank.

All suffering is relative, they say.

...

I also found my small but mighty collection of literary rejection slips, which run the random gamut from Seventeen to Random House. Ah, youth.