A Time-Traveller’s Guide to {Looking Forward}

When I found a stack of my journals in my stepsister Julie’s bedroom, I did what anyone who’d religiously poured herself out onto bound pages since the age of 11 would do—panic and destroy them. I dramatically tossed a few years of my youth, en masse, onto my dad’s smoldering outdoor fire pit. Except for one leather-bound notebook, which emitted a putrid odor as its edges curled and roasted into nothingness, the rest were ash in seconds.

Because I’ve always kept journals by year, I know exactly what I destroyed. Most of my college days vanished in an absurd conflagration.

That was almost 30 years ago. My prefrontal cortex was not yet fully developed, but I should have known better. I should have known that I’d regret my overreaction. I should have known that torching my words wouldn’t erase them from Julie’s mind. I should have known that when I’d start a new journal every January, my opening lines would always be a small lamentation for those incinerated pages. Sigh…

I don’t regularly read old journals—I’m not that in love with myself—but I have indulged on occasion, always by serendipity. A closet reorganization or an office move will reveal a forgotten box of notebooks, and it’s too hard to look away.

To stop and spend time reading an old diary is an irresponsible but irresistible forfeiture of the present moment.

Who doesn’t love a little time travel? Joan Didion once wrote that her prodigious journaling revealed that she’d “lost touch with several of the people [she] used to be.” Amen. Last summer, I found a journal inside a dusty hat box on a high shelf and spent the next two hours trying to make sense of the stressed out grad student who emerged from its pages. I wanted to reach back through space and time and embrace her, tell her to calm the fuck down, stop being so hard on herself, and that it all worked out. Younger me could’ve really used some Xanax.

It can be fun, or at least informative, to look back. It’s scary to look ahead.

My therapist calls it “foreboding joy,” which seems plausible but also just sounds like a shitty perfume Elizabeth Taylor once hawked. Perhaps if the wise-old-crone-Natalie of the future would reach back through time, embrace me today, tell me it all works out, I’d be less timid about staring 2025 in the face. I mean, once I got over the abject terror of communing with a time-traveling spectre, I’d be grateful to know I should unclench a little and embrace the coming days with more joy, less fear. Because someday, I will stumble upon this year’s journal (I never get better at carefully storing diaries!) and see that I am anxious about my son going off to college, my daughter driving, my parents getting another year older, scheduling a colonoscopy, that giant flotilla of ocean trash, publishing in pursuit of tenure, turning 51, and the state of everything on the entire fucking planet. Future Me will also discover, though, that I am equally optimistic about all of these same things… well, except the colonoscopy; I don’t care how good the drugs are.

And that is something I’ve noticed by amassing and reading old journals—I suffer tummy rot over eh-vah-ree-thing while also holding out childlike hope. This psychological thumb-wrestling is not obvious to anyone; I process life solo, via pen on paper. Come on, insult me! I won’t have a good comeback for a day or two because, ya know, I gotta go think about it (i.e., write it all down to assess whether I deserved it or if I can call you a cee-you-next-tuesday). ’Tis an inefficient way to navigate life, but I’ve done it for the better part of 40 years. And although I can’t really know what I was thinking from 1992-1996 because of the aforementioned pyrotechnics, I’m confident those torched entries followed the prevailing theme: I’m a scaredy cat with grit.

And so I’ll white-knuckle my way through 2025 but with a huge grin.

And I will journal like crazy and tuck random ephemera—perhaps a piece of confetti from my son’s graduation—into its loose pages for safe-keeping. And I will take a deep breath before I react to anything because I‘ll remember… that Julie could not read my handwriting.

And because I really hope to have many more years ahead of me no matter what becomes of the garbage flotilla, I will schedule that damn colonoscopy. I might even show up to the appointment with a little spritz of Foreboding Joy on my wrists for good measure.