Put Away Childish Things

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." — 1 Corinthians 13:11

I've been reading my old diary. Not a pleasant experience.

The entries mostly from age 11 to 17 — there's something there. You can actually watch the kid get less stupid, sentence by sentence, year by year. The handwriting tightens. The self-pity gets more specific. The observations stop being just complaints and start being something. Not good, not literary, not even coherent half the time — but moving. Like watching a crooked thing slowly straighten itself out.

Then 2009 hits.

Then 2010.

And it's all the same. Every entry. Same cadence, same register, same exhausting tone — like someone flipped a switch and froze the voice in amber at exactly the wrong moment. I sound like a 15-year-old trying to sound like a 15-year-old who reads. Which, fine. Except I was 18. And then 19. And I'm still doing it now, apparently, in 2017, in what is supposed to be a diary and not a creative writing assignment for a class I already dropped out of emotionally.

Here's the thing that actually bothers me. I don't speak like this. Not even close. In real life I swear casually, I trail off mid-sentence, I laugh at shit that doesn't deserve laughing at, I say "yeah no" when I mean "absolutely not." Real, messy, often inarticulate — the way humans actually talk when nobody's grading them. But the moment I pick up a pen, or open a text file, something shifts. Some old, embarrassing muscle memory kicks in and I'm performing Journal Voice like I'm auditioning for a role I've already aged out of.

Paul wrote that verse about speaking as a child. I wonder if he ever considered that some of us would figure out how to stop understanding as children, stop thinking as children, but somehow never manage to stop writing as them. That specific failure isn't covered. The chapter ends.

I burnt the old notebooks — I mentioned that somewhere before. The physical ones. Thought it would fix something. It didn't. The voice survived. Apparently that's the part that doesn't burn.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. Force a different register? Write badly on purpose until the new bad becomes habit? Just accept that the diary and I have a frozen relationship that neither of us has the energy to thaw?

Probably the third one. I'm not exactly known for finishing what I start.

Whatever. The lungs are still working. The pen still moves. Childish things, I suppose, are at least something.