I think I have more issues with being 14 than I first realised. Since writing yesterday's entry (it was actually done in my paper journal a few days ago), I can't stop thinking about that time period. Everything I see, hear, read reminds me of it. Today alone, I've filled several pages in my spiral-bound with memouries of things I thought I'd forgotten.

I know what it is. The metamorphosis I underwent shortly after my 14th birthday marked the beginning of the end. When they sent me to The School, whoever it was that I'd become 20 months earlier was precisely what I clung to so desperately for the year that I was there. Whether it was right or wrong, good or bad, the persona was mine, and I wasn't about to let them take it away from me. Because I held to it so fast, it integrated, forever enmeshing and intertwining itself with the person I was, could have been, might otherwise have become.

I stripped off my virginity in December, 1986. Again, I was 14. And that's an issue that is somehow jumbled up with all of this. My only theory is that it has to do with the forced denial of my sexuality not long after. That doesn't cover it entirely, though, and I can only guess that the surplus pain is simply hauntings of guilt and regret at having been too young.

And then there's a hard little clot of...anger? Remorse? I don't know what it is, exactly; the wily little beast keeps scuttling further into the shadows. It's buried way down there, too, but if I root about on my hands and knees, I catch a glimpse of it. I need to write this one out, but I'm not sure it's appropriate here. Some huge part of me just hollered "don't ask for their permission, you moron," but...I just don't know.

If it isn't appropriate here, then where? These thoughts have no place in my books. They aren't things I should like to discuss with Therapy Dude at this point. I've all but stopped writing things in my paper diary that don't eventually end up here, as I've found I need feedback on too many things. This, I think, is one, as well.

Mmm, "feedback" isn't quite the right word. It isn't that I want you to comment on what I've chosen to write here. It's that...if I were to write it knowing that no-one would ever see it, I wouldn't feel finished.

That doesn't make any sense. I need to think.