Object-ives #4: How My Diaries Have Helped Me Build a Lifetime of Words

Forming the story of my life, one page at a time

Some of Jesi Vega’s diaries

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”

When I was nine, my father gave me a diary for Christmas; the cover was brown, and the date was printed at the top of each yellow page, alongside a checkbox for noting the day’s weather. On New Year’s Day, 1979, in an unknowing nod to Virginia Woolf, I began my own story with the following words, “Dear Diary, First day of the year. I wish I had my own room.”

It was the first entry of many more to come. From college onward, I moved east to west, lugging an ever-expanding collection of diaries, notebooks, and journals across the country. But it was only recently that I finally shelved them, on a massive wooden bookcase I’d set up in my garage just for this purpose. For the first time, I’m now able to examine each marble composition, spiral bound, and sticker-covered text, and gaze over the entire chronology of my inner life from elementary into middle age.

”Ok, this isn’t a journal or a diary or something for personal feelings or dreams, this is the basis for my ‘novel’ (if I ever write it),” I’d written. “This is what college is like, day to day.”

I found those words on the first page of a dusty book with a floral cover that resembled antique wallpaper; the entry was dated on my eighteenth birthday, so I’d most likely received it as a gift. This was during my first year at a prestigious liberal arts college and, despite the preface, I don’t remember having wanted to write a book. Nevertheless, I was, in fact, doing research for my first novel when I grabbed it from the shelf, so upon opening it and seeing that introduction, I felt as if I was receiving a dispatch sent across time by my younger self.

I began reading.

My first “day to day” observation was that there were “no BAGELS OR FRIES” at the grill in the College Center during finals week. Next, I described eating fried clams with my friends Jennifer and Cyrus and expressed my outrage that the cafeteria had served peach cobbler three days in a row. Even then I was a romantic and a mystic as well as a foodie, so a few pages later I declared that “Everyone deserves at least one tortured relationship in this life,” and contemplated the possibility that Jesus Christ had never experienced lust.

On page two of that very first diary, I wrote in pencil that Mark, my seven-year-old brother’s best friend, was cute. At 18, I was still writing about boys—boys I liked and boys I hated. Approximately 35 pages into this volume, one of those boys breaks up with me and my dedication to coolly observed reporting devolves into frequent rants of the kind I’d hoped to avoid and histrionic venting which ranges from “I wish he’d look at me” to “I want to kill him.”

As I matured and my collection of diaries and notebooks continued to grow, I began to anticipate that one day, they’d be valuable. In my twenties, I dreamed of being a filmmaker, so first I imagined them as background material for my biographers. Then, once I’d relinquished my fantasy of being biography-worthy, I envisioned some future scholar citing them in a definitive history of Generation X. More recently, though, I’d started to question whether they held any value at all, and even posted on my socials to ask friends and followers whether I should keep them or toss them in a fire.

But when I found that introduction, written decades before I went looking for it, I began seeing my words in a new light. Rather than just containing stories, I started to consider them as desperate missives from an overstimulated younger self one whose brain was endlessly barraged by doubts and questions, whose intersecting identities as a highly educated, Bronx-born Latina, and Jew, made her feel as if she belonged nowhere, and who was desperately seeking the threads with which to weave her story.

As humans, we build our identities around our stories and, for the most part, we model those on the narratives we already know. But my notebooks reveal a girl, and then a woman, who didn’t see herself reflected in any of the stories around her and felt isolated in her struggle to discern one of her own. Had anyone else even been ambivalent about upward mobility? she wondered. Had anyone else ever questioned the ethics of The American Dream? And why did she have such a hard time deciding what to do with her life, navigating social situations, and wearing pantyhose, when those things seemed to come so easy for other people?

With no recognizable context for her experiences, her life seemed to progress as only a random series of disconnected events suggesting that, whatever a life was supposed to be, hers was falling short.

“Please,” her writings seemed to plead year after year, “I can’t make any sense of this, will you try to make sense of it later? Can you find the story in this formless mess?”

Despite being shelved, the journals in my bookcase are still something of a mess. The size and thicknesses vary; they’re bound in a variety of materials and textures, some are grimy, some have yellowed, and, in some, the handwriting is too illegible to read. And yet, the story of the girl—and then the woman—who wrote them is finally coming into focus. The universe may be made of stories, but unlike atoms, stories must be made. And sometimes, it’s impossible to write those stories until we’ve got enough raw materials and loose threads to sew them together.

Jesi Vega promotes multicultural storytelling, identity exploration, and cultural hybridity through her work as an editor, facilitator, and community arts organizer. A Bronx-born, Puerto Rican-Jew with backgrounds in acting, dance, and film, Jesi brings a multidisciplinary approach to all her creative work. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies We Need a Reckoning, and This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land, and her essay “North Star” will be featured in an upcoming anthology from Tacoma’s Creative Colloquy. Jesi graduated from Vassar College and the University of Chicago Divinity School and is working on her first novel.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Recommended reading and viewing on possessions:

“Here is a list of things to keep in your personal archive” by

Shae O.

(Shae the Historian)

“Is the ‘Trash House’ in Fairfax District a hoarder home or an elaborate recycling project?” by Christopher Buchanan, Los Angeles Times

“Do You Have ‘Aspirational Clutter’? Here’s What You Should Know.” by Caroline Bologna, HuffPost

“This Compact Home in Paris Has Nearly 70 Concealed Closets” by Michele Koh Morollo, Dwell

Video of 101-year-old Margaret Dunning, who loved classic cards, including her 1930 Packard Roadaster

“Splurging? In This Economy? Here’s How to Do It Right” by Open Secrets Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel, The New York Times