Old Journal…/TMI alert.
Added 2024-03-07 22:47:01 +0000 UTCI came across an old journal while cleaning. I decorated the cover in a fashion we did in art school a lot, gluing a photocopy of a drawing to the cover and then painting it and fixing it with Crystal Clear, a clear acrylic, highly toxic fixative that shortened my and most of my cohorts lives. The design is a yin/yang that I designed and tattooed on myself as the first tattoo I ever did.
I have only kept journals a few times, and this is the only one I have really hidden away. Other journals were “sketchbook” journals, which sometimes I veered off into traditional diary writing within, accompanied by drawings. The first time was when I first travelled abroad, and then the second time was five years later when I took a mountain biking trip through the four corners area of the south-western United States. Both of these ended up being fortuitous, since I would love to do autobiographical work on each trip and have extensive notes on them!
This journal though I focused on writing, and I purposely buried it in my things because it was maybe the darkest period of my life and I was going through it, and I know it’s going to be a hard read.
I flipped through it and read the first few pages yesterday… I started it the day after I tested positive for HIV in 1996, just before protease inhibitors hit the scene and it was still a death sentence. Not long after I went through a painful breakup and then had my worst period of substance abuse. I kicked everything for good by 1999, but this journal ends well before that. I don’t know exactly where it leaves off. I just know it’s full of raw emotions and I haven’t wanted to revisit it… but after seeing where it starts, I think it might have some value. I don’t know what I will do with the tale it tells, but I am ready to read it.
