reading a ghost

I was just looking through my journals and found a blue notebook I started as a chronicle, not of my life but specifically of my writing. Here's a sample:

Oh, why can’t I say what I want to say well, for a change? Why am I so stilted, why can’t I write, why can’t I be like Anne? God, God. My eyes are puffy – I just saw the movie Anne Frank on T.V., just read some of her stories over – I can’t strip away from myself the phony and sensationalist from whatever is underneath, if there is anything. I am coated with layers and layers of complexes and phonyness – Anne was all real, real.

I’m looking through this book for anything real - no, NOT real, I don’t know what it means – I mean, something that MEANS something, that isn’t trite and stupid – not stupid – unnecessary. Nothing. I’m full of nothing-ness. I can do nothing and my brain is stunted.

God, I wish I could write.

That was written on Jan. 1, 1967. I was sixteen.

Here's another entry:

17/2/70

I’ve just looked through this book from the vantage point of a 19 year old professional actress in her co-op in Toronto – and yet it’s all still very real to me – even the cloying self-consciousness of some pages I can understand and remember, saying things I felt “teens” should say and feel. I’m not trying to excuse myself, I hope.

It’s a shame that this book is really only a chronicle of Beth Kaplan’s aging incoherencies, instead of the development of a creative mind, as I’d hoped.

Always full of raging self-confidence, that Beth. No wonder the work has poured from her pen.