This is the time book. I've had it since I was tiny. Apparently, where other little girls would cuddle up with teddy bears, I used to take the time book to bed with me.
I've moved about so many times in the last fifteen years that I have all sorts of boxes of random stuff which I never got around to sorting. They ended up in my parents' garage until I got my own place, whereupon I shoved them in my garage. Now, finally, I am sorting them out. Today I got down to the deepest layer and it was a treasure trove.
Along with the time book, I found the bunny my gran knitted for me when I was born: we have a photo of me on the sofa with bunny and she is bigger than I am. There were also letters from grandparents who have since died; postcards my friends wrote to me when we were teenagers; letters from the penpals I had as a child. I found a birthday card my grown-up cousin made for me when she was five. Lots of letters my mum wrote to me when I was at university (in the time before mobile phones), and one or two letters my dad wrote. My dad only ever writes to me in a crisis, and his letters are always helpful. Orders of service from funerals of friends and relatives. Clearly I had never had the heart to throw away any of these things. In the end there were so many letters with so many memories, I ended up picking up big piles of them and shoving them in drawers. Will I ever read them again? Maybe not, but I still can't throw them away.
It was a very odd experience excavating these layers of memory. I am not the same person I was at five, at fifteen or at twenty-one. Now I'm in my mid-thirties I tend to get depressed about the fact that my youth is no more, although (and I know everyone says the same) I'm a much happier and more secure person than I was in my teens and twenties. The most depressing document I unearthed was a questionnaire I filled in when I was seventeen and it was going around the sixth form common room; my answers reveal how uneasy I was in my own skin, as many seventeen-year-olds are, I guess. I've always been anxious, but I understand my anxiety much better now and I am getting proper treatment. I also understand the lies my anxiety tells me and can challenge them more effectively.
Some of the funniest items in my memory box are my old RE books, in which I make my atheist beliefs very apparent. I wonder what that opinionated teenage girl would think if she saw me now.
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