Record

My freshman year of high school, my best friend and I created friendship calendars. On them, we kept track of things like when we skipped school, when we were fighting, notable events at school like "science labs," sleepovers, etc. I don't remember what triggered this friendship recording, but we made multiple calendars and documented all sorts of details about our lives.

I have never been much of a journaler. Well, I guess that's not entirely true since I have a whole stack of journals that have sporadic entries spanning from 1991-2013. But I've never been able to really get behind journalling. It has never felt quite right. When I journal, I feel like I am someone else pretending to know what one is supposed to journal about. And it never actually gets at what is going on in my head. So to me, my journals are just amusing/horrifying records of points in time when I wrote down my thoughts in a format that mimicked what I thought journalling should be. Which is an interesting record all on its own. But it doesn't feel accurate.

But there's something about these friendship calendars that bring back so many crazy/strong memories by simply stating events that happened on specific days, without the accompanying feeling that these calendars are trying to be something that they're not. Just reading the line "Holly sister's with KC, Shari's, got ALL weird, Kristin walked home" on Wednesday, March 21, 2013, throws me back to McGillvary, wearing my backpack, trudging home from school after an early release day at school.

So recently, instead of feeling that little Young Women's pang of guilt for not journalling, I've started recording more information on my Google calendar. Things I did. Brief words that describe how I felt about something. Little changes like new employees at work. I know that journalling serves a lot of purposes, and only one of them is to actually record things that happened. But this weird little record somehow feels so much more full and true than anything I've ever tried to write out in paragraphs.

Here's a little taste of my calendaring skills. I hope Holly doesn't hate me for sharing this. I present to you, "Kristin and Holly 'friendship' calendar #3 (February)." We're talking February 2000 here, people. I'm pretty sure we intentionally put scare quotes around the word "friendship" to reflect the tumultuous nature of our friendship. We were awesome. And freshman in high school.