We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,’ Didion writes. ‘We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.’ She ignores that to forget can be a supreme grace. I treasure all of the diaries I kept when I was a child precisely because of the distance I feel from the girl who wrote them. Seventh grade Alice: ‘It’s totally cool because it’s like we’ve moved on to another level of flirting.’ Eighth grade Alice: ‘You know I’ve been thinking way deep things lately.’ First grade Alice: ‘Dear Alice, I don’t know. Love, Alice.’ ”I have always been a person who is ‘sensitive,’ and I take too long to get over everything. Reading old journals and notebooks, I am reminded that feelings are, in their essence, immediate, and they pass over us like shadows. All the words I collect are artifacts of sentiments that do not exist and could not even be conceived of again—ideas that once desperately needed to be expressed disappear, leaving husks of language that I save, I care for.

I choose to write because it’s perfect for me. It’s an escape, a place I can go to hide. It’s a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It’s a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It’s a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It’s control, when I feel so out of control. It’s healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.
And it’s fun, when life is just flat-out boring.