Secrets from a Teen Diary

In hindsight, it seems rather scandalous that a twelve-year-old girl could be obsessed with a man in his thirties.  In 1995, my bedroom walls were adorned with posters of Dean Cain tearing his shirt open to flash the red and yellow ‘S’ on his Lycra undergarments.  Under Dean’s smouldering gaze, I spent many evenings listening to The Cranberries and writing earnestly in a 128-page, orange Olympic exercise book, the cover of which I had emblazoned with “Keep out!” and “Go away!” in capital letters.

Not trusting that those warnings were enough to dissuade curious eyes from prying in my diary, I used code names for boys I liked.  I nicknamed one ‘Gaston’, inspired by the muscular hunk from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast:

“I still like GASTON!  Even if he is going to ask Jo to the dance.  His eyes are really blue, like Jonathon Taylor Thomas’s.  On Monday we had our first dance lesson and I danced with Gaston.  I know he doesn’t like me but there is one last thread of hope.  If not, I might ask Aiden.  (Talk about desperate.)”

The dance – the dress I would wear, who my date might be, my friends’ opinions on boys who might make good dates – was a well-traversed topic in my diary entries from that year.   Almost as important was my twelfth birthday party at Sizzler, which I declared was “majorly cool fun” and resulted in worthwhile spoils, including a friendship bracelet kit.  My status in the pre-teen hierarchy continued to rise as I hosted my first slumber party:

“7 October 1995

Dear Diary

I just had a sleepover!  Believe it or not!  We played in the garden then had pizza and made up dances.  We went inside, set up our sleeping bags and ate while watching Dennis the Menace.  It was so cool!  Yesterday I went to the Royal Show!!!!!!!  I had a meat pie. 

At school, some guys are dealing marrawana”.

I was so infused with sleepover excitement that I devoted more attention in my diary to pizza, sleeping bags and meat pies than I did to the gritty underbelly of primary school drug trafficking.

Sadly, my innocence and euphoria would not last.  Although I still speculated about boys, whinged about oboe lessons and recorded the minutia of every episode of Superman, I grew gloomy as I left primary school and navigated the turbulent waters of teenage angst.  Just a few years after the momentous sleepover, I mused on what I perceived to be the futility of domestic life:

“The day my husband becomes a stranger to me may happen without my noticing, my spontaneity will eventually vanish under a heavy waterfall of relentless responsibilities and burdens that come with being an adult… I will be preoccupied with trivial thoughts like what to cook for dinner, when to pay the gas bill or what time I have to pick up my son from soccer practice.  I will stop smiling, cease capturing tiny moments in the Polaroid of my mind and forget what it feels like to spin around and around in the moonlight and collapse in a giggling, half-hysterical pile on the wet grass amongst crickets and the infinitely black sky dotted with winking stars”.

I cringe and laugh at my former melancholy; I want to tell my teenage self that adulthood is not synonymous with misery and point out that I’ve never enjoyed the sensation of wet grass or crickets.  Although my old diary entries now seem self-absorbed and superficial, I wonder if the things that currently occupy my mind are equally silly.

Maybe, when I’m 80, I’ll revisit my journals and wish that I had worried less, weighed myself on body fat scales only once a year instead of every day, looked up more often from whichever Pulitzer-winning novel I was reading, and slept in longer on weekends. 

As frustrated as I am about my slight neuroses and persistent anxiety, reading my adolescent thoughts makes me hopeful.  We might not feel any different but we realise we have progressed when we can see how far we’ve come.

I’ll leave you with my favourite sign off, written (and festooned with love hearts) on 18 April 1996:

“Dear diary

Well, it’s still the holidays and I haven’t done much except veg out.  I just sit there and daydream about meeting Dean Cain (fun, fun)!  I make up episodes of Lois and Clark, starring me!

Oh my gosh! I just realised that I haven’t written about Dean Cain sending me a postcard!  I got ‘Super wishes, Dean Cain’.  He personally wrote my address!  I can tell it’s his writing.  I’m positive.

See ya,

Luv the Dean Cain obsessed lunatic – ME!”