Every couple of years or so I get a chance to talk to my friend S, who was there for me through my years of painful growth in high school, and is one of the few people who knew me back then and whom I still keep up with now. We talked about the people we used to know and the people in our lives now, and how we've changed and who we are now. He's no longer drinking himself to death, thank goodness. The biggest change for me in the past few years has been turning outwards (finally) after a decade plus of self-observation and slowly adjusting, improving, changing. Boyfriends who loved me, whom I loved in return. Learning confidence and to take pride. Academic accomplishments. Independence and self-reliance.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf talks about being free of external influences and deterrents to create and to write. Having worked out the self-doubt and awkwardness instilled from years of isolation, I've had a lot of fun discovering, finally, the pleasures in life - music, friends, cooking, art. But this, and taking care of T, has taken a toll on the Woolfian internal life which had defined me for so long.

So, a return to journaling. To recapture myself, and to make a room of my own.