Lessons from a misspent youth

A month after I unearthed a box of old journals and letters, I am still engaged in the pitiless task of reading through them. I have learned many painful things about myself and others, and I still don't quite know what to do with this enormous trove of treasure and debris.

The diaries, in particular, are troubling. They reveal such an ugly side of me that my impulse is to get rid of them as fast as I can so no one else can ever read them. But they so clearly spell out certain errors I've made in life that I am tempted to keep them around so I can remind myself of the futility of certain paths of action or, particularly, inaction.

I spent much of my 20s feeling miserable and aching for someone to save me. I wrote bitterly and daily about the behavior of friends and relatives who I felt had let me down. There was Other, who lacked drive. There were the 'rents, who were critical. There was my younger sister-in-law, who was distrustful and unloving. There were my friends from college, who were judgmental and opportunistic.

Someone—I think it was Freud—said that every character in a dream is an aspect of the dreamer. And there's a parallel in my journals. It's patently clear 30 years after I wrote them that every complaint I made against anyone was a thinly veiled point of dissatisfaction with myself, and that the solution to my unhappiness was not that the people around me should change but that I should change. Somehow I was paralyzed—and I was furious with the world for failing to get me up and running.

I tried to convey this vital lesson last weekend to my daughter C, whom we sometimes refer to as "the princess" for her penchant for getting others to run her errands for her, among other things. I told her about the momentous lesson I had learned from reading my diaries. "It's really important that you take responsibility and do things for yourself," I told her earnestly. "People either won't do what you want them to at all or won't do it the way you want them to, so ultimately you'll be frustrated." Not so, said she smugly. "I find that a surprising amount of the time, you actually CAN get people to do what you want." So perhaps this is one of those lessons best learned by the teacher and not the would-be student.