You can go back to the past, but no one will be waiting for you there
why i journal
When the idea of “thought daughter” began going around on TikTok, I mentally shuffled it away into the folder of social media-crafted identities that I feel compelled to align with in my head.1 It feels almost criminal to say that I identify with a silly slang like thought daughter, but I do (please don’t take this with too much sincerity, but with some sense of on-the-brink-of-satire-but-maybe-not). I think too much about myself, about my role in the world, and especially about what other people think about me. Whether it is through my pen, writing in a diary as a continuation of a practice I’ve done since I was six years old, or indulging in checking my “on this day three years ago” pictures in my phone photo gallery, I am a victim of thinking about the life that I have experienced, the life I am experiencing, and the life I will experience in the future. I love a good thinking session, perhaps to a point where it begins to consume too much of my life and sends me into spirals where I’m unable to get out of bed for fear of what’s to come, or what’s not to come.
And yet, despite the many pressing issues of the world and our existence that plagues my mind and likely yours as well, the metaphorical space in which I spend most of my time is in the past. I love the past. I find comfort in the past. I find myself traveling there through different portals: my photo gallery, flipping in my diary, listening to playlists. If I won a million dollars through the lottery, I would go back there physically, too. I would take a trip around the world to return to exactly where I was before, to stay in the exact same studio apartment during my exchange year in Korea, to my middle-school home in Los Angeles, my dormitory in San Francisco. And I would do all of these things even knowing that nothing would ever be the same again, do all of them right now, even though the people are gone and the stores have different names.
Perhaps that’s why I took it so personally when I first came across this image online, as if the writer themself had sent a direct message to me meant as an attack. You can go back to the past, but no one will be waiting for you there. Yes, I am who this is for. I am one of those people who wallows in experiences already finished, a child who doesn’t ration their Halloween candy and is sad and regretful when their last mini Hershey’s bar is gone. But when I ruminated on the idea a bit more, I realised that I actually didn’t mind. I accept the words as truth. When I go back, I go back alone. There is no one there with me. And that is not why I return.
I’ve never used journaling prompts as a regular way for me to organise my journaling; as in, I rarely begin writing in my diary with the intention of addressing a predetermined topic. This is not to say that using prompts is bad—it’s just a different manner of writing, and whatever suits the writer is the best style for them. But this means that my journal is, and always has been, for seventeen years, chaos. It has always been an unstructured mess, and an imperfectly-perfect documentation of my life.
When I re-read my journals, I can see the raw feelings and emotions that I was working through in them. My entries jump from topic to topic. Some days are me recounting what the week was like, a few sentences that give little more context than the boxes on my to-do lists in my planner. Others are a full page of anger and sadness, marked with unreadable words because tears made the ink run, or scribbles when my thoughts were faster than my pen. A few are quotes of affirmation or meditation. No matter what their content is, as I read them I am instantly taken back. I split in two and watch a smaller, younger version of myself as she sits down and puts pen to paper, the two of us in the same reality across different timelines.
Sometimes it feels like watching a bad movie for the thousandth time. I can’t stop what is coming. I can't tell her to stop talking to that boy who doesn’t deserve her attention or to not post a picture of her makeup on an internet filled with people who see everything women do as for their sexual gain. It’s impossible to reach through the page to grab her shoulders and tell her to be strong, be happy, be proud. I cannot arm her with the future, and maybe that’s why it hurts to wade through those memories written with my hand, and I skip a page or maybe twenty as I read.
But in the same way, future me is unable to do any of these things for the me right now. Tomorrow there will be a version of me who might read the page from today and cringe at her inability to be something else. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that she was here, she will be here, and I am here. I exist. I got through it. I am my own proof of resistance, the product of my past and the inventor of my future. And I know this because my journal tells me so.
People often say that life is better lived in the present. I wholeheartedly agree, and I do my very best to exist as I wish, to enjoy the little things, and look at the stars and hug my friends and cook good food and smile at dogs and read books and lay in my bed and play video games. But every so often that feeling of nostalgia creeps up on me and I go digging around in my diaries or photo albums.
So I freely allow myself to go and sit in the past. It’s not about going back to the good old days—God, I would never forgive myself if I discounted all of the struggles past me faced to get here—instead, it might be fishing for some hope of my future. I go back to the past and no one is waiting for me there, not even my younger self. And that emptiness is exactly what I need.
thought daughter: internet meme describing a person who is a thinker, usually very self-reflexive in perhaps an overly done way; an overthinker
stop, i feel attacked, but in a good way! this is a stunning piece 🫶🏼