Welcome to Excerpts From My Super-Secret Diary, a new A+ feature for Silver & Gold members in which we publish for you the incomplete and/or highly personal thoughts we’ve written on paper with actual pens.
Today Riese has plucked some lines from a stack of diaries spanning the years 2008 – 2014 and is presenting them here, for you. These are not in chronological order! If you think I’m talking about you, don’t worry, it’s somebody else. xoxo gossip girl
1.
Why do I do it. Why, when nothing but temporary thrills will come of it. Because I am an animal? Because we are all animals. Because I want to feel things. Because I am a body.
2.
When he told me he didn’t “get” why I’d ever want to “be intimate” with a woman, he essentially put a stopwatch on the coffee table between us. It went off a few weeks later and I stopped taking Wellbutrin and started drinking more and went out into the night to find girls because I was in New York City and I could be anyone.
3.
This is me on an airplane descending into Oakland. I feel confused that my life is happening, going on like this, in this way. I feel that I have no idea what will happen next. Does anyone else on this plane understand this or feel this way.
4.
I think I drink and smoke alone too much. I wonder if the internet makes people drink alone more, ’cause you’re never really drinking alone. I think I need to become a better person for 2011. Like I should stop drinking and smoking alone, for starters.
5.
This is my company, this is my business, this is my brand. I am in control and I call the shots and I need to remember that. This is how I take MY LIFE back. I say no to her. I say “if you want to walk away, we will find a way to return what you put in.” You helped get us where we are now, but I can’t want it anymore. I have to be sure of this. It’s radical but I think I’m right. WE HAVE TO TRUST OUR INSTINCTS.
6.
Places that I go that are holy to me:
– The library
– The bookstore (treated as library)
– The Waverly Restaurant
– hotel rooms
– Green Lake at Interlochen
– (I used to have Columbia, but now it aches)
7.
It’s happening in a few days. Camp. This thing we’ve talked about and thought about for so long is here. I don’t even know what to expect because this has never been done before. This is the first time. I hope everybody likes me and that I like them. It has to work, right?
8.
I needed to tell stories! Being in them seemed like the easiest way to do that.
9.
She’s SO CUTE. She can write and draw and grow things and maybe this is me going back to my roots to someone who reminds me of where I came from but maybe this is me being a bird with another bird going into the future.
10.
I have a habit of wanting to predict things. I haven’t always been this way, only after the trifecta: divorce, death, mom coming out. Then you grow up, you get cheated on a few times, unexpectedly fired, kicked out of your apartment, maybe more than once. So I try to control my life by assuring myself that I always knew what was coming at the time! I just didn’t want to admit it to myself! But that’s what LIFE actually is — surprises! I can’t be prepared. I’ll always be unprepared. I wasn’t lying to myself back then, I was simply in the dark, as humans so often are. Making myself miserable now worrying about a diminished view of the future won’t make that future any more predictable. At least I can be happy in the meantime.
11.
Anxiety is a part of life. I cannot stop bad things happening by predicting them.
12.
There’s no gym, I’m gonna go broke refilling my medications, I have no income source on the horizon, and nothing promising in the works for anyone ever. But I don’t care because I have her, and every day I can see the sun rise and set so close to the ocean and I can pretend like my life is better than it actually is.
13.
She’s growing tired of me. I don’t think we even like to do the same things. I feel so sad and stressed and mad and alone, like I just want to go home and lie on my Mom’s couch until I die.
14.
Maybe that’s what we had in common, our mutual belief that I needed help.
15.
Dear interns: you are my heart’s hood. I wish I had more time to know you, but I also know that knowing people is where we start getting into trouble. All friendships eventually turn cranky, and we’re still safe. That night in August when we got high and wrote a story together reminded me of why we bother existing at all. It was nice to just be me. I wasn’t anyone’s business partner or girlfriend or roommate or co-worker. It was nice to be with people who understand what I’m talking about because to be honest most of the people in my life rarely do. It was nice to be with young people who don’t know yet how little the rest of the world will care about poetry. That adulthood is a bargain.
16.
I guess I can just keep taking Xanax until I forget. I just don’t like feeling that something changed, and maybe that something was me.
17.
I cried when the bill passed in New York. Unexpectedly — tears just appeared like someone waiting for their cue. Send in the clowns. But on Thursday it was all still just an idea. We went to the Revel & Riot party. They make t-shirts and they look really good. Marni told me afterwards that Aja said I was fun. Me! Fun! Tegan and Sara Quin were walking around in the crowd. They kept catching my eye — not because they’re Tegan and Sara but because they are exquisitely constructed human beings. They’re beautiful, like they’ve never had a pimple or a sunburn or fallen down drunk and woken up with a bruise. But they write the songs we listen to after our bruises and sunburns!
18.
I think it’s about daring to do something. You just have to be unsafe, do something other people don’t think they would do. You sort of pressure people into thinking we deserve it. You act as if. As if we are pirates. This has to be honest. We need to not lie or be afraid. Gotta shine on like bright queer candles, raging raging raging.
19.
So it’s all been a lie, and I feel stupid again. For the first time since meeting her, I want to fuck her. Like as soon as someone fucks me over I need to open them up, like last night in the car I thought, I could do this how. I could swallow you whole. I could crawl inside you and never leave you and what then, what would I see inside you that I can’t see from here.
20.
When nobody’s knocking down my door, I have trouble opening it.
21.
When did we become so crabby? When did I start feeling so gross all the time? Why do people keep asking me for a plan. I have no plan. I have no plan. How many times do I have to tell you that I have no plan.
22.
It’s funny to just get it wrong over and over — love. I think I held on so tight because I was banking on it. I was auditioning for the role of “wife,” but I just kept getting callback after callback, and that spot on the wall where the cast list belongs, well it never went up. I could’ve asked about it but I didn’t, because I knew that asking would get an answer and that answer would be the end of me ever thinking it’d be anything but Our Town all over again. Of course I’m not Emily. Who would ever pick me to be Emily. Look at my bangs!
23.
I have one foot in this world — this new world, where everything is about my writing and my friends and t-shirts with colors like flowers and the idea of moving to California. Then there’s the root of me — drunk or stoned and alone in this dirty city I love, wondering what happened to me or when I’ll get the motivation to clean up my act. Then behind that is something worse, and old, like ghosts. I give myself a lot of room to fuck my life up and not feel guilty about it. A response, I’m sure, to remembering all the anxiety I used to have about drinking and sleeping enough hours and being skinny and accomplishing everything. I miss myself, I miss who I was before I picked up these habits, that aiming for it.
24.
She says that when she goes out of town it’s like she stops existing. It wasn’t always like this, though, not at the start. I don’t know how else to live. It’s true, I sometimes have to force myself to think of other people when I’m alone. I just really enjoy my own company! This is why everybody cheats on me. Isn’t it.
25.
I could never love a man again. But I could jerk him off, take his money, and spend it on Alex?
26.
If Autostraddle fails, I will submit to the machine.
27.
It feels this way every time — behind the curtain, she turns out to not be a wizard after all. Who are these women who come into my life and eat my brain, flip my eyeballs around, tell me dinner is on its way. They offer me what religion offers people, really: a chance to fix all my problems, a solution to what ails me. These women choose their roles and have a certain way about them. They will “make everything okay.” They have everything “on lock.” They will “take care of it.” But they can’t, really, can they? I mean, some people can barely even take care of themselves. This is the clearing I can walk through, if I want to. I can be my own wizard.
28.
I’m going to start a magazine and ideally I will then change the world. I need to go to the doctor and either be okay or get sent away. I hide so much from everyone. Oddly enough, the only thing I’m sure of is that I can change the world. That’s all I actually believe in, that’s the only thing I don’t doubt.
29.
I’m just worried if I take my life into my own hands, I could break it, or else discover that it is weightless, and has no meaning.
30.
I feel so PEACEFUL that I will be paying everybody, like I can sleep at night, even though the stress of making the money to do that isn’t peaceful at all. It’s better, this is better than before, I hated having it be so unfair. It’s emotionally exhausting, you feel so indebted to people, and so our solution was to avoid making anybody WORK for us, we stuck to activities that were fun to participate in. But still. I don’t understand these CEOs who can pay their writers, but don’t. Or pay themselves millions every year while paying their editors $25k. All I want is to pay more people more money to do more and better things. How do they sleep at night?
31.
I’m not dead yet so I have to start living soon and see who I meet along the way. Instead of continuing to save up for a dream only one of us is having.
32.
I think my goal in life might be “Revenge of the Nerds.”
33.
Welp, Abby’s it. It’s an unexpected twist but this little wing splits me right open and I should care about how young she is but I don’t. Because she wakes me right up. Thinking about this weekend — that’s what falling in love can feel like when you’re ready for it. It can feel safe and enormous instead of scary and confusing — not that scary or confusing love always ends, it’s just a different route. This kind of love is less like falling and more like love is also catching you in return. The ferris wheel kept going and going like it’d never stop, and we don’t have to, either.
34.
The day I got hit by a car was still a really beautiful day, is what I mean.
