March 25, 1981

I found out that Miss Goldman got married today - last Friday. I couldn't believe it. I was so so happy for her.

(Author's note: I started writing in January or February 1981 after I learned that my own mother was getting married. This was horrible news for me and I became suicidally depressed for reasons I am still uncovering in therapy today. I started writing almost immediately. It became therapy for me. I wasn't really a writer before this, but once I was in pain, I automatically picked up a pen and started to write. All of my earliest writings were thrown in the garbage. I would take out a piece of paper just to write down what I needed to get out, and then I would reuse the same paper and write over everything I had just written. Here's an example:

It was just the act of writing which was so therapeutic to me. In the earliest stages of this, I had no interest in saving my writings. It wasn't until this notebook that I began to save my writing, and as you will see, the early stuff is really boring because now that I knew that I was intentionally saving my writing, I think I felt inhibited and scared that someone might find it, so the early stuff isn't that exciting or revealing about me).