The polaroids are under my bed. They’re safe inside a shoe box I don’t remember buying. They lie awake with me. I wish I could fast forward through this part.

My room: dark with the curtains half-pulled, the window cracked open just enough for the echoes of the city and engines roaring from a distance to reach my ears. Now that I live alone, it helps me sleep. The noise is like a song playing in the background.

Fifteen-year-old me would be proud—I hope—as back then having the lights on and the blinds shut tight were two mandatory things to check from my to-do list before bed. I think she’d be mostly surprised. A little unexpected twist. In one swift motion, I open my drawer and take a cheeky peek at my old high school journal, and while I mostly cringe, the entries aren’t that bad (by no means are they good, either). I just hold my breath a lot when reading them.

A few days before senior year ended I wrote:

Things are shit but I want to leave on a nice note.

I think about that one line a lot, especially now that I’ve overcome my fear of reading what my angsty teen self had dramatically poured out. In lockdown, I had the choice of staying on top of my lectures or cleaning my apartment. Obviously, I chose the second. But with that came the baggage of facing some unpleasant memories, the guilt of revisiting who I once was and the anxiety that certain memories bring. What began as simply organising my belongings turned into rediscovery and reliving. A lot of feelings, too—yuck, I know. Yet, the thrill was prominent. I quickly put aside the embarrassment and jumped down a rabbit hole of my own life. It’s honestly kind of addictive stalking your past teen self. If you’re thinking of walking along the same path, here’s my advice: have a limit. One or two pages over the weekend, before waiting another couple days to skim through the next. It was the anticipation that kept me going despite some lines being unreadable—and I mean that literally with full-on ink blots and a word that could either have been ‘chicken’ or ‘checkin’.

Like many things in life, the ride is fun until it isn’t.

This little exploration of mine turned sour a lot of times. As a writing student, I’m used to criticism, yet when I gazed over the words that fifteen-year-old me had written on my bedroom floor, I couldn’t help but overanalyse. The smallest details, I picked up. The slightest mistake, I pressed pause. Certain pages made me smile, but I also found it terribly difficult to move on when the not-so-good entries popped up. Negativity lingers longer, after all.

I’ve spent more time in my room in the past year than I ever have in my entire life, and I’m quickly running out of pages to read. It feels strange to put a mirror over who I was back then and who I am now. Maybe that’s why they don’t recommend you doing it, in the first place. It’s something like putting rose-colored glasses on before quickly taking them off. But, there is no competition, no old versus new you. There is only you—you and all your experiences. Sometimes, it gets easy to forget this.

It’s different to reading a novel, or watching a rom-com and seeing the protagonist lose the love of her life before realising that she made a mistake. She then runs at full speed trying to find him (somehow one or both of them end up in the hospital before the credits roll in). We tell ourselves we don’t know the ending of these movies, yet we do. We know things will work out, somehow, and we fast forward to the good scenes. But, when you read your own stuff, you’re forced to go back in time and make some stops that might suck. A longing feeling remains—hoping for an alternate ending to some pages, wondering when the credits will show up.

For one, you look back on how you’d do anything to relive that day your parents agreed to buy a piano, when your classmates surprised you with a song on your birthday, when you found money in the pocket of your jeans on a random Tuesday. On the other hand, you also get forced to feel the disappointment of thinking you weren’t good enough (I can tell you right now: you have always been more than enough), the moment your friends cancelled last minute on something you’ve spent weeks planning, that one time you cried in the school toilet without anyone knowing and came back to class with a smile. These are the ones that stuck with me the most, the ones I couldn’t fast forward to skip. These are also the ones I’d want nothing more than to let go.

But, I can’t. I hold them like the polaroids under my bed, left alone until I one day—while I’m walking around the city—I suddenly remember. Forgotten until I decide for it not to be and dusty until it isn’t. Except you can’t hide memories the way you do with polaroids. When you snap a bad photo, you can throw it out. That one on graduation night that came out blurry? I never took a second glance at it. This, however, isn’t the case in real life.

Maybe that’s why it was so important for high school me to say goodbye on a “nice note”, whatever that means. The truth is: I’m still trying to figure out a lot of things, and I have a feeling I’ll keep doing this for a long while. That’s my note on growing up. It never truly stops. And the credits never roll in. The good moments pass, while the bad ones stay just a tad long enough until you start to forget.