When I started therapy in January of 2023, the first thing I told my therapist was that I had trouble envisioning the future.

When I was little, ask anyone, I wanted to be a fashion designer.  I was sure, so sure, sure enough that, when I got an art piece selected to run in HighLights magazine (my artistic achievements peaked early!), it very clearly states underneath my drawing of a goose sitting atop what appears to be a rainbow-colored plane or blimp:  “Jennifer P., age 8, future fashion designer.”

At the beginning of August, when I used my random date generator and pulled August 17th and saw most of these entries had to do with social settings, I decided immediately to write about friendship.

It was ironic that I couldn’t eat when we stopped seeing each other because I ate more around him than anyone I’d ever met.  My disordered eating just simply didn’t exist in his orbit – on our first date alone, I put more food in my mouth in front of him than I had during the entirety of my last eight month relationship. 

I am currently in the stage of a break-up where I’ve started to Google all my past relationships, checking to see how their lives turned out — or, really, how my life could have turned out had we stayed together.

I have realized, recently, that I have a habit of separating my life into chunks. This as an organizational tool isn’t necessarily toxic — here are the Idaho years! the college years! the learning to be an adult in NYC years! the learning to be a sober adult in NYC years! — but when I think about the past, I tend to stick on the first strong, visceral memories from each category and use my 5 Year Diary as a resource to color in the rest of the details.

My old roommate, Serria, once pointed out a habit my entire family shares when it comes to storytelling.  All of us will often start off a story by saying a sentence or two, but then we stop, interrupting ourselves mid-thought by asking the person we’re talking to, “Have I told you this before?” 

When I started this project, I knew the randomness in choosing the date would likely lead me to entries I did not want to share on the Internet.  Whether for emotional or legal or just really, really, really embarrassing reasons, I knew there were going to be moments of my life I could not make public – but, because it didn’t come up when I ran the numbers on that first post, I figured I’d deal with the problem if and when it arose.

Over the past decade, I’ve found comfort in writing, in length, about experiences that have happened to me. I love that I am able to lace together memories from different times in my life to create a successful storyline and it’s been a skill that I’ve carried gratefully around with pride. (In an extremely “on brand” moment for me, I do believe the knowledge that I even possessed this ability stemmed from winning a $1,000 scholarship my senior year of high school for writing a piece about my first kiss).

Looking at these entries all together, you probably couldn’t tell that most of them are about my body. But, because I am me and can read my own subtext, I know they are. Last year, I got pneumonia and was unimaginably sick — sick enough that, on some nights, I genuinely believed I was going to die. Coming out of that, I no longer cared if my stomach looked a little fluffy or if my arms weren’t as toned as they had been a few years back. I was just happy to be alive.

When my family moved to Idaho, I was two — it was just me, my dad, my mom and my mom’s 4-month pregnant belly that I had named Jonny. This was not supposed to be the name of the baby who would later arrive, but I’d gotten into the daily habit of placing both hands on my mom’s stomach and addressing “Jonny” by name while recapping my toddler-like adventures and clearly, it stuck.

I’ll start out with this — I have thought of myself as creatively blocked for a long, long time. Over the last month, I’ve told a few people I have been feeling this way, but before that, the only person who actually knew was my boss. In the middle of one of our weekly, standard 1:1’s, I surprisingly blurted it out when I wasn’t expecting to. It’s hard to admit you aren’t feeling creative when your job is to BE creative and I guess I’d naively hoped that just saying the words out loud to the person who is in charge of me would cause all my ideas to float their way back into my head.

Years ago, when I was trying to get sober for the second time, I ordered a sparkling water when I went to dinner with friends of a friend.  I had not told anyone I was trying to get sober, nor that it was my second go around, instead disguising it once again under the ruse of doing the Whole 30 and “feeling, like, really good!”  I wasn’t ready to admit to myself, let alone my friends, that I thought I might have a drinking problem.

The telltale sign that I am mentally unwell is when I begin rewatching “GIRLS.” The only person who knows this is my ex-roommate, Serria. We lived together for five-and-a-half years during our mid-to-late twenties, so it’s safe to say she is the person who has most often seen me at my highest highs and my lowest lows. I don’t watch a lot of television or movies, so when I did (and did it repetitively), it’d allow her to pick up on viewing habits that reflected my mental state.

Because I used to spend every day of every summer of my teenage years covered in tanning oil on my best friend’s trampoline, I now spend one day every year naked in a small room with a woman named Meredith who takes not one, but two photos of each individual mole on my body.

A couple weeks after I published the last piece I wrote on this site, a story all about being confident in my independence and feeling proud that I don’t have to rely on a man, I found a tiny mouse in my apartment and immediately wanted to rescind everything I had written.

When I was 19, a boy touched my arm at a party and changed the entire trajectory of how I thought my life was going to go.

I got my second shot on the second of May and, after — while still cautious — I started doing some activities I hadn’t done since the previous March. Most importantly, I visited my 95-year-old grandfather, one of the most significant people in my life who, prior to COVID, I had the fortune of being able to see every few weeks. (Our reunion ended the way it usually has for the last almost-thirty years — with the two of us watching black and white films in the living room and me eventually falling asleep on the couch before him because, despite our age difference, his bedtime is about four-and-a-half hours after mine).

I spent my first week back in NYC going to every type of doctor’s appointment imaginable. I thought of myself as healthy, almost laughably so, considering our placement in the midst of a pandemic, but after over a year of pushing off all but one meeting with a medical professional due to COVID, I scheduled a different appointment for each day of that first week I returned.

Before I traumatically sprayed blood all over my oral surgeon and his office after an artery burst during my wisdom tooth surgery in January, I thought I would never see him again. At 28, I was geriatric (his words, definitely not mine) for the surgery, but even so, we both expected it to go well enough that I would be in and out of his office within the day.

That is not what happened.