Throwback Thursday, Installment Numero Dos!

Hi there readers! In case you were abducted by aliens last week (which is the only excuse I will accept for not reading my blog), I recently started a new feature called Throwback Thursday.

What’s Throwback Thursday, you ask? (Okay, you’re probably not asking. In fact, you’ve probably stopped reading and are now off eating a sandwich. But for those of you who are with me, about two years behind the curve in social media jargon…) I’d be happy to tell you! It’s an opportunity to reminisce, once a week, via your social media platform-of-choice.

Or, to be slightly more specific – in my case, it’s an opportunity to give the world a nostalgic glimpse into my youth, thanks to my recent discovery of all of my childhood journals.

I thought it would be appropriate, as my first official Throwback Thursday, to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). So this week’s installment comes from my VERY FIRST DIARY when I was just a wee babe of only eight years old:

(I like diaries that have the word “diary” on it, because there’s a chance I might be rummaging around in a drawer one day, come across a book like this, and say “Oh, perfect! A book about a cat!” But then I would open it and be immediately disappointed, because I just wasted eight seconds of my life and it is not, in fact, a book about a cat. I’m a busy lady, I don’t have eight seconds to spare for confusion like this, you know? This very deliberate labeling eliminates that kind of thing. You can’t put a price tag on that.)

ANYWAY. I bring up the context of the physical diary, because I just want you all to know the lengths I had to go to in order to make this post happen. I’m not sure if you were quite as obsessed with journaling when you were younger as I was – but if so, then you should be familiar with these little babies:

That’s right y’all, my diary had a COMBINATION LOCK on it. To hold all my TOP-SECRET SECRETIVE SECRET-Y SECRETS.

I imagine that when the children’s journal company conceived this, it was meant to keep out pesky little brothers or untrustworthy gradeschool friends… But they should be supremely proud of themselves, because apparently the technology is also effective at keeping out 24-year-old grown-up adults.

I want you all to know, I really did try to do the honorable thing. …And by that I mean, I tried to guess the combination.

But when the only available letter options are D-I-A-R-Y, there are only so many word combinations, and only so much disposable patience.

…So instead, I used my SUPERIOR WOMANLY STRENGTH to claw it open like the Hulk. And now it’s open forever, pesky siblings or untrustworthy friends be damned.

This diary was a gift from my Great Aunt Ann. She inscribed the following message inside, which I thought was appropriate considering my current endeavor:

(“Dear Susie,
I hope you will write in this diary. Not every day, but on days that something happened to make you happy or even something sad. Writing your happy or sad feelings to your “special friend” (your diary) as you are growing up helps you relive those days when you are older.
When all the pages are full, put your diary in a safe place, then when you are older you can read it and relive your “growing up years.” 
I love you, Susie, and I wish you the best life has to offer. You are “special” to me.
-Aunt Ann”)

Little did she know that the “safe place” would be my parents’ garage for 16 years, and “reliving my growing up years” would be in the form of a blog post on the Interwebz. But AWWWW, right?

So without further ado, here is the very first time I ever put pen-to-paper to document my life, on December 27th, 1997:

Hello,
My name is Mary Susanne Wittbrodt but my nickname is Susie.

Not totally sure who I thought I was writing to here, but apparently it was someone I hadn’t met yet.

I got this diary for Christmas from my Aunt Ann, as you probably already know from reading the first page.

I like the acknowledgement that this was probably unnecessary information. Which means that even as a child, Susie was already prone to wordiness, and already apologizing for it.

I will be writing to you hopefully every day if I am able to.

Sorry diary, no commitments here. I’ll write if I get to it, okay? Get off my back.

 I will be telling you secrets (hence the lock) and good or bad parts of my life. After all, that’s what a diary’s for. So, turn the page!

Things we can surmise about what I thought of my reader:

1. They have never met me and needed to be informed of my name.
2. They care if I write every day.
3. They need to be told what a diary is for.
4. When they reach the end of a page, if I don’t tell them to turn it they will probably think the diary is over so I better give them instructions.

And that’s all she wrote! That wraps up al my eight-year-old brain wanted to put out into the world on December 27th, 1997. The next post was written the very next day, and starts out “Hello, This is Susie.” (Just in case my reader forgot who I was overnight. You just never know.)

Thanks for stopping by for this installment of Throwback Thursday!

(This was Susie, by the way. I forgot to mention that.)