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.