Angsty Notebooks

This morning I had a very interesting and nostalgic walk down memory lane. Josh was being such a good boy entertaining himself, and Matt was gone, so I took advantage of a few quiet moments of privacy to pull out my old writing notebooks from high school.

What I discovered:  a whole lot of reasons to be terrified of having an adolescent daughter someday. 

I think the randomness of this notebook might be the only thing that convinces me how all-over-the-place my brain and emotions were as a teenager. It's frightening how different I was on the inside compared to how others must've seen me. Aside from the occasional church talk outline or General Conference notes (which were so out of place that they added to the schizo-feel of this collection), here are some of the contents of my old notebooks:

~ a bunch of hate songs I wrote about stupid boys
~ ridiculous, embarrassing, dramatic notes written between my friends and me during class
~ poems about my Mr. Perfect, who I was sure I'd never meet because the world basically sucked
~ lyrics to a Good Charlotte song that I rewrote to portray my hatred of bimbos
~ a note I wrote to a boy, but chickened out and never delivered
~ more than one mention of my "blue-eyed husband" (Matt's eyes are brown)
~ lyrics to a couple of Nsync songs, written out so I could memorize them faster, of course
~ my attempt at being artsy and spiritually insightful, paralleling the Gospel with nature in ways that make absolutely no sense
~ funny poems about my crazy family during the holidays and several very sentimental poems/letters for them
~ a poem called "High School Drama" that is written with more teenage angst than I ever thought myself capable of possessing
~ countless doodles and pages of random rhyming words (must've been a way to jump-start my imagination)
~ a couple of pieces about "who I am", with huge exaggerations and made-up quirks that I included because I thought they sounded cool or worked well in the rhyme scheme

~ a handful of unfinished melodies, which oddly enough, I remembered perfectly before even reading the music, like they've been stuck in my head for years...much like a crazy person

~ a very critical analysis of my family members when I was sixteen and had a severe case of Jan-Brady-middle-child-syndrome

I think a part of me secretly thought I'd be Avril Lavigne when I grew up, complete with black fingernail polish and a permanently P.O.ed expression. If not, I thought I'd at least write songs for her about life being unfair and about giving boys the Finger. But on the outside, I think people had all different kinds of ideas about me. Nerdy? Studious? Shy? Awkward? Tomboy? Bishop's-daughter-good? Bishop's-daughter-bad? Stress case? Flirt? Airhead? Snob? Psycho? Wannabe? I seriously am so confused about the person I was as a teenager that I think I could've been any one of those people, depending on the day.

As much as I love my high school friends, I do NOT miss high school. Today I learned that if we ever do have a daughter, and she's anything like me during puberty, I expect to have my hands full.