My father recently visited me in Austin. He brought a few things from home in a goodie bag that says ‘happy birthday’ on it. Video games, a NYG scarf, and a little book of vignettes I wrote in the ninth grade.

It’s a pretty funny, and scary, thing to read things you wrote in the past. When you write (or do anything else) every day, you get this fantastic sense that you’re getting better at it. So to look at something you produced in the past is to look at something worse than you could produce now. I think that’s the reasoning behind my nervousness in opening old work.

But to sit as a 23 year old you and read something written by the thirteen year old you, that’s something else entirely. Something I do not have a word for. Sure, I remember my freshman year of high school. I remember lots of things about it. But it is harder to remember what my self was like at that time, what that consciousness was exactly like behind my eyeballs. It’s like Windows 8 trying to remember what it was like to be Windows 95. If nothing else, it’s fascinating to realize that the creature responsible for those words became the creature responsible for these words.

I’ve resisted the urge to edit my ten years old words. Here are some of them:

I have been cursed with and [sic] odd and very conspicuous laugh (perhaps the universe and God [sic] have a sense of humor, for they must find it funny to ail mine with such a disability), a fact that has been made clear to me by both my cousins and peers (my cousins used to mock my laugh, but since I am older and bigger it never went on for long).
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My laugh, or true laugh really, is a whining, almost stretched sound, like the gasping breaths of one who is suffocating or drowning. Or a donkey. It has plagued me for some time now, and has gotten to the point that I try desperately to suppress it.

This does not mean I’ve stopped laughing, by no means. In fact I love stand-up comedy and have even come up with my own act (or at least tried to). I laugh at comedians, the jokes of friends, things in life I find funny or ironic, even when no one else does, and sometimes at nothing at all (don’t ask why, because frankly I have no idea).

Without laughter life becomes tedious, and to put it simply laughing is good for you- mind, body and soul. Anyway, instead of refusing to laugh, I now try to “regulate” my laugh, at least when I can. However, sometimes when I’m truly “cracking up,” I fail miserably at this endeavor. But lately I’ve begun to accept my laugh. After all, why should I sacrifice the simple pleasure of laughing simply because of my own self consciousness. [sic] /end9thgradeself

So far, I’ve learned that the thirteen year old me was very frank; loved commas and adverbs. Also, this was pretty soon after my Catholic confirmation, and it looks like I still believed in god. This vignette might have been the last time I spelled that word with a capital G.