What is Ashchives?

Exactly twenty-five Christmases ago, my mother inscribed a gift that would shape my life more than any before or since: "To Ashleigh from Mommy: Hope you enjoy keeping a diary as much as I do!"

It was a red spiral-bound Ramona Quimby Diary, one featuring both fill-in-the-blank segments and lined pages. Over the course of the next year, I would dutifully respond to both the prompts and the blank lines, filling them with many anecdotes about my cat and deep dark secrets like breaking my red headband. (That one was, in fact, such highly priviliged information that I actually wrote it in the secret code provided by the diary's creators.)

Much like my thirty-three-year-old self, my eight-year-old self both admired and adored my mother, so naturally I welcomed the chance to emulate her own diligent recording of lifely happenings. Therefore, I did keep my New Year's Resolution for 1988 to "keep a diary and write in it. I promise."

Although I broke many, many promises to myself that year and every one thereafter, something else happened. The practice -- or, rather, art -- of journalling and diary-keeping became firmly, unflinchingly entrenched in my core being. I graduated from fill-in-the-blank diaries (I also had, two years later in 1990, the Judy Blume version) to calendars cataloguing what I wore every day and everything funny anyone said at school. I filled composition books and spiral notebooks with musings on friends, family, futures. I wrote down goals and tracked my weekly progress toward them. I confessed secrets and fears. I detailed the daily happenings. I recorded end-of-month reflections featuring categories like "Best Day," "Funniest Moment," "Person I Most Wanted to Knock Off the Planet," and "Person Who Most Wanted to Knock Me Off the Planet." I rated months and years on scales of one to ten. I compared and contrasted boys and later men. I wrote down the best one-liners from the literature I was encountering in English classes at Knoch High School and later Allegheny College. I admitted things that should only ever be said to therapists or God (but probably none of the above). In short, I was preparing, I thought, for my career as a writer, one who would be lucky enough to have decades worth of material.

Today, my life as a high school English teacher features the exact same sad irony of nearly every high school English teacher: I love to read, but I am busy reading what they're reading, so I never read anything I want to read. Additionally, I spend my spare time reading enough student writing that my own writing is not only on the back burner, but not actually in the kitchen anymore. Lately, I'm sure, it might not be in the same house or even the same zip code. I am officially what one would call "rusty" (as that poor kitchen metaphor conveniently illustrates). My girlhood dreams of being "a real writer" seem to fade more with every passing school year, and when I glance at the twenty-five years worth of collected journals and diaries on my shelves -- and also consider the hundreds of pages worth of electronic fodder from various blogs from the past ten years -- I feel like I have failed in a very fundamental way.

Why aren't I doing more of this thing that I was once very certain I was born to do? I chose my college major (English), my minor (psychology), and my teaching career all very strategically: I would read the great works of literature so I would have a model for creating my own. I would study human behavior so I could inject realistic attributes into my characters. I would stay connected to reading and writing through my day job, one that would afford me all summer to write and maybe one day publish.

Well, though I loved both my major and minor -- and (this is for you, humanities skeptics) I'm proud to say that I use them both daily in my work  -- I can't say that my plan to write in the summers has materialized at all. There are, as there always are, excuses: I had to write a Masters thesis. I had to recharge. I had other things to do.

One of the things I've always found time to do, though, is continue the joy of writing down my soul word for word. Though much of my writing these days takes place in the form of a facebook status or a tweet, I maintain both paper journals and blogs, and just this evening my boyfriend and I created a detailed written record of our first Christmas break together. This is still what I do and who I am, and though I may never see my name splashed across a novel cover, I do think the writing I've done thus far in my life might be worth sharing with a small audience of family and friends.

Therefore, "Ashchives" -- Ashleigh's Archives, name courtesey of Kendra Stanton Lee, one of the best bloggers I know (see why here) -- is born on January 1, 2013, exactly twenty-five years after I started my first diary. I will, each day, feature an excerpt and a reflection on how silly, sad, wise, foolish, hypocritical, or crazy I was at age twelve, eight, twenty-five, seventeen, thirty-one, eleven, or last week. Entries will be chosen at random, and they will be appropriate for an audience that could include my mother, my boss, or my students. (To be fair, my boss is very liberal, my students are nearly adults, and my mother is completely to blame for starting this whole thing, so maybe that's not saying much.)

With a nod to the fact that it's a new year of new beginnings, I want to feature this entry about a particular new beginning for my third-grade self. From September 1988 (spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are all preserved in their original form):

Mommy FINALLY Painted my room! After years of just talking about it she did it. She is a VERY good painter. She thought It would be a pale pink, but it was bright once she got it on the wall. I hardly have any toys left! But I'm glad. I don't miss anything except my jump rope. I don't know what happened to it.

In my current mindset of always having someone or something to miss -- my grandmother, size 7 jeans, being an undergraduate, believing in Santa Claus -- I long for the days when the only thing I missed was a jump rope. I also long for the time when a jump rope would have been a recreational activity and not representative of a way to squeeze oneself into size 7 jeans.

Happy New Year, all. Hope it's painted with bright pink surprises and lots to jump for joy over.