Fuck. How am I still alive? When I was in 8th grade I started keeping a journal, and even though I rarely add to it now, I decided to go back and read some of my thoughts from my early teen years. It's the most depressing thing ever. Each page is filled with more and more discontent and misery, and I honestly don't know how I avoided suicide through all those years. I'm not asking for pity here, but I'm honestly shocked. For the past year or so I've been so happy that I forgot how depressed I was in all my years previous. I've never shared a single word from my journals with anyone, but I kind of feel like sharing my poor teenage angst here now, because, let's face it, I'm feeling sorry for myself! Not who I am now, but who I was. Poor little baby Crystal. In the midst of my Aero-obsession, at age 16, I wrote a journal entry on the 19th birthday of Joe Perry's son, Tony.

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4:50 PM
Where will I be when I'm nineteen? At the same college my mom went to, living at home, with no friends, a virgin, afraid of the city, still not looking like Bobbie Brown. I'll be studying how to teach kindergarteners the days of the week because they'll be the only people in this world who don't intimidate me. I'll be such a lame loser that I'll even make fun of myself, staring for hours into the mirror. This is not who I want to be but I realize that it's totally inevitable. My face always turns red and it never even gives me a chance.

So where is Tony now that he's nineteen? I hope he's living his dream. He deserves it more than me.
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Page after page after page goes on like that. Most of the entries are more descriptive and dramatic, but they're too personal to post. After reading over all this, I truly cannot discount the importance of Lexapro. That, and actually having noteworthy accomplishments to my own credit. I'm happier than I've ever been, and it's astonishing to me, when I look back and see how miserable I was for so long, that I made such a complete change in such a short time. I ended one of my entries from 2006 by saying, "I just really hope that there comes a point in my life when I can look back on all this and laugh." But I don't laugh. It's depressing.

But I also learned that I claimed the name Cristal Diamante for myself on November 30, 2004, while sitting at the new computer and testing out the fonts. That's cool.