Selected Quotes from the Breakaway Journals, Hooray!

(Eh, I knew I wouldn't be able to stay away too long.)

Yesterday I wasn't feeling well, so I used my unexpected downtime to spend a little time with my favorite person:  me.

Me has a complicated system of journals that, upon Me's death, could easily be combined with Me's blogs and Me's books to recreate Me's entire life.  Yesterday, it was the Breakaway journals (two and a half books and counting) that were pulled from the shelf.

Here are a few selected quotes that I liked (and that weren't too incriminating) and that will probably make no sense to any of you because I have provided zero context.  Enjoy this extremely selfish entry, which puts even my usually extremely selfish entries to shame, yay!


JOURNAL ONE

March 26, 2011:
“Fuck Stephenie Meyer for getting fucking rich off the shittiest fucking books ever written.”

April 24, 2011:
“It’s astonishing, really, how many of my early morning dreams involve me looking for a usable bathroom all because I really do have to pee.”

July 30, 2011:
“I’m torn between wanting to record the rest of the week’s events and not wanting to destroy the painfully overblown optimism that I exhibited in the previous entry.”

“[I] told him that my rule of thumb has always been not to trust a girl who doesn’t appear to have female friends.  And look at me.  Within Breakaway I’ve become that girl.”

“I took [him] to Krystal on the way home and he mocked a drive-by shooting at a stoplight with a police car right next to us – he laughed so hard he could barely get the impression out.”

August 5, 2011:
“About 45 minutes after I got there [he] did that weird thing where he just gets up and leaves randomly with no warning and for no apparent reason.  Actually, that is an apt description of how I see him living his entire life.”

September 16, 2011:
“…spending too much time contemplating the origins of humanity and human behavior has given me this, a desire to anthropologically study my own jaw bone.”

September 23, 2011:
"[He] may or may not have offered to have [him] killed for me.  I was borderline terrified.  'You want me to take care of this for you? I can take care of it,' he kept saying."

JOURNAL TWO

October 25, 2011:
“And this is what I hate about Facebook.  I am drawing massive conclusions based on stupid evidence, none of which is my business to begin with.”

October 30, 2011:
“It’s a stupid circle of loneliness.”

November 28, 2011:
“It’s all so meaningless.  All anyone ever does is talk about other people…and I’m just sick of it.  I’m sick of gossip, I’m sick of other people’s shit, I’m sick of having to talk to myself in my head to work out my problems because I don’t have anyone to talk out loud to about them.  I’m sick of my own addiction to Facebook, constantly checking to see what I’m missing.  I’m never missing anything, and I don’t like that I’ve come to rely on it to fill a void that I could be filling by doing something useful and productive.”

“I will not – will not – place the blame on myself for this one.  And I wish I could stop analyzing myself and my behavior and actually mean what I said in that last sentence instead of second-guessing myself.”

December 11, 2011:
“And even now I don’t know if that was a pun, a drunken verbal slip, or if he actually didn’t know the word ‘salutatorian.’  The whole thing was baffling.”

December 19, 2011:
“Sean pulls me aside and asks if [someone] and I are going out.  I stumble through telling him that we are ‘headed out’ to the Slider Inn…

‘You know that is a really bad idea, don’t you?’ Sean says.  And then he tells me all about how [this guy] is gay and just doesn’t know it yet.  (Which, considering his current outfit, made me laugh quite a bit.)”

December 23, 2011:
“He asked me how old I am.
’29.’
‘So you’re 30, then.’”

February 1, 2012:
“I feel like I used 29 – and Breakaway – as both an excuse and a distraction.”

"This year, I will be truer to myself, and learn from 28 and 29.  I will be happier."

February 17, 2012:
“The group on Thursdays now is different.  It used to be all athletes who ran hard, talked a few minutes after over a beer, and went home.  Now it’s hashers (so many hashers!) and people who show up to run a little and take advantage of Barry’s hospitality (and free beer) by partying hard after – and continuing the partying somewhere else after the Breakaway beer runs out.  There’s a darker edge to it all right now that I can’t shake.”

March 23, 2012:
“Even though I am ‘over it’ and he’s off the market and whatever, sitting across the table from him for fifteen minutes prompted me to fill up pages in a notebook preserving the conversation in detail.  So I may still have some work to do on that front.”

June 8, 2012:
“It is a disturbing sign of my age that this dream (which suffused me with warmth) involved me meeting his parents and getting along great with his mother.”

“Is that what I’m reduced to now?  Thinking not in terms of excitement but in terms of settling for the best of what’s left over?”

August 2, 2012:
“Just getting outside the Breakaway crowd and things progressing in a manner that was neither weird nor awkward nor painful was refreshing.”

August 8, 2012:
“Reading [her] memoir was incredibly enlightening in terms of what can happen to a person when they don’t let go.  When instead of letting memories fade, you amplify them in your mind until they take on a meaning that was never there to begin with.  When instead of seeing what’s right in front of you, you get stuck in a cycle of self-delusion until you’ve worn away your self-awareness.”

September 17, 2012:
“It was literally the most normal and functional either of us had ever acted around the other.  I felt grounded (although maybe a little drunk) coming out of it.” 

September 24, 2012:
“Goddammit, I am hard on myself.”

September 25, 2012:
“Moving on…  (Maybe if I say that enough times, I actually will.)”

October 7, 2012:
“…I am prone to getting sucked into the microcosm of Memphis, but the world is so much bigger than that.”

“But maybe that just brings all of this together, because maybe what seems unusual to me just isn’t for the vast majority of people who slip through life without giving in, giving all, and seeking what’s below the surface.  I feel like I’m utterly surrounded by shallow, ego-driven relationships that exist as much for convenience as anything else.”

“I like consistency.  I like hard work.  I like dependability.  I like the crowd who stuck around in the rain to see the end of Tour d’Esprit.  I like that as I write this, it feels much more like the end of a chapter than it did with the last journal.”

JOURNAL THREE

November 26, 2012:
“I’m nervous about the marathon.  I’m also kind of sad that it’s here already.  While I was sick of training, there is also the irrefutable truth that training gives me a schedule and a purpose that I perhaps hide behind.” 

November 27, 2012:
“He did walk me to my car and open the car door for me.  What he didn’t do was tell me that I looked nice, offer to get me a drink, or make any attempt to hide his brutal physical assessment of other girls while I was in his presence.”

March 11, 2013:
“They looked every [negative] cliché of modern family there is, and for the umpteenth time, I found myself in the awful position of finding such gratitude for my own life after glimpsing the raggedness of someone else’s.”

“I need to try harder to, in some way, engage (unlike the last two weeks when, in spite of a herculean mental effort, I shut down, distractions in my own mind drowning her out so completely I at times lost the thread of conversation).”

“Not that long ago, I would have taken that personally.  Now, I just kind of shrug and pass it off as yet another runner having yet another breakdown of some sort.”

March 13, 2013:
“How is it that I can be so sure of myself on a Tuesday and so sure of absolutely nothing on a Wednesday?”

May 11, 2013:
“I just feel that familiar, dreaded darkness that comes after a night of excess.  The entries earlier in this book are all so eloquent and heartfelt.  My recent entries are short and meaningless, as if the story was really only interesting when it wasn’t happening.  Maybe my 'what ifs' are more important to me than my 'really happenings,' and that’s why I can wax poetic about longings but can’t find the strength to record any relevant details about why it’s all died.  I’m terribly disappointed in myself.”

June 17, 2013:
“I’d forgotten that I wrote that last entry.  I don’t feel bad about any of it anymore.”

June 26, 2013:
“But I think this is where my maturity is (possibly) starting to (finally) show itself, because today, instead of dwelling on the caveats, I woke up with the solid conviction that no one else’s experiences will exactly mirror my own.”

“And that seems like good symbolism.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, or ‘the best.’  It just has to satisfy the moment, and as long as you let it, it always will.  There is liberation in falling short.”