Going Through My Old Journals

Okay, so I was stressed out from studying and decided to take a break. As strange as this seems, I spent my half hour long break rearranging my bookshelf. While doing this, I uncovered a few journals from previous years in my life. Most were not noteworthy, being sketches of cartoon characters from shows like Adventure Time, drawings of random OCs that I apparently made up, and indiscernible rambling words (I had a thing about lists when I was younger). Some though, were more interesting.

I found two notebooks that seemed to be my song books from late elementary school, all the way up to freshman year. Sadly, most of the pages seemed to have been ripped out at some point, but some of them were still intact. While flipping through them, I remembered a conversation I had today in literature class. A fellow classmate said that poetry was 'stupid' and had no use in modern life. I countered with how poetry, songs, and all forms of literature helped to catalog the things going on during a time period, and how people felt about them. Current events shape literature, and what better way to learn about the cultures of yesteryear than to study how they effected the people around them?

This brings me to my point. I have been writing since I was young. Poetry, plays, music, stories, you name it, I've probably written it at some point; though, probably not very high quality. I have saved most of these journals, mostly due to the fact that I have a strange habit of collecting and hoarding office supplies. This does come in handy, seeing as I can go through them to see how I was doing on a mental /social level during that time period. As I was flipping through, I realized that I didn't understand what was going on exactly in the poem in reference with what was going on around me at the time. Granted, I have pretty spotty memory at best, but still, this had me thinking about my earlier conversation. How did my literature shape with my surroundings? I could read through and try to make sense of it, but at the same time, I could not truly grasp what was happening at that specific point. This made me a bit sad, seeing as these poems were very personal and were clearly impacted by specific events that seemed to mean nothing to me now. At one point, these were the most important things in my life, and I can't even remember what happened during them.

Sorry for the rambling, I seem to do that a lot :)