Dear diary,

Today I cleared out my childhood room and I rediscovered you / my old diary that I used to write in when I was a young teenager.

Re-reading you / Re-reading the diary made me cringe. I also found it quite sad / upsetting. I was clearly quite unhappy back then in those moments. I was really struggling to come to terms with the changes my body was going through at the time. I felt different and alone, and I didn’t have the courage to tell anyone about why that might be: Not even you.

I had clearly given up on making my situation any better. I hated myself, and sometimes that hatred spilled out towards others around me, in my writing.

My writing included: A far-too-detailed multi-chapter analysis of the social dynamics of my school.

My writing included: A full-page explanation of why I love my bed so much, and why it’s the only thing keeping me alive(!).

God, it feels like a million miles away now, but I guess that experience is still part of me, somehow.

It can be taboo to talk about these things, but looking back, I am very very pleased that I made it through and successfully became a trans adult rather than just another statistic.

Those old diary pages… They make me cringe, but they also give me some direct connection to my younger self. They give me some unfiltered insight into how I used to be. It’s a way for teenager Lu to speak to fifteen years into the future Lu: Over my full life’s years away.

Unfortunately, I can’t respond. But if I could… I would say that (a) That’s very cringe, and (b) I am still writing cringe diary entries decades later, and I somehow justify it by calling it a wikiblogardenite.