Caminhos da Memória

After much procrastination and excuse-making, I have finally started one of my big life-projects.

You see, when I was 15 and moved to Paraná, Brazil for a year-long student exchange, I started keeping a diary. I wrote every single day during that year (such discipline! where did that all go?) and thus have a pretty complete record of the changes that took place during such a critical time in my life.

It's all there in writing...the first feelings of being ashamed to be an American, the struggle to learn Portuguese, the identification with Brazilian culture, travel to the Amazon and all along the coast and interior of the country by bus and boat, the unfortunate development of an eating disorder, lots of dates with lots of boys, and the decision to not go back to high school and instead go straight to college and independent living once back in New Mexico.

I kept writing after that year abroad, so I actually have a detailed record of my life from age 15 to about age 23. So much happened during that period...

Last year my mom very kindly DHL-ed me all of my journals. My grand plan was to transcribe them to Word, thus quieting the paranoid part of my mind that is convinced there will be a fire or a flood or some other disaster and I will lose all of my journals, and also giving life to the dreamer in me that recognizes I've got a pretty good first draft of a book (or books!) just waiting to be put together.

It's taken me quite a while, but I'm finally tackling this project. Last night I opened the first journal from my year in Maringá, starting in late July 1997. TEN YEARS AGO, people! How did this happen? How did all this time slip away?

I remember being on exchange and meeting other students that had returned from programs, say, 3 years prior. My reaction was, "Wow, that was ages ago!" And here I am now, a full decade after the fact, forever changed by the decision to live and study in a country not my own.

My initial reactions to re-reading my journals are the following:

- my handwriting is still exactly the same as it was when I was 15 years old;

- I was more-than-slightly obsessed with boys;

- I already had a poor self-image, in particular with relation to my body;

- I used the word "damn" in all its variations way too much;

I wil share later in the week some of the funnier passages I've come across so far.