A new confidante!

I was an avid journaler for many years. More accurately, a diarist — from third to tenth grade, I kept diaries that evolved from My Little Pony covers to classy Peter Pauper Press gloss. No matter the cover, my diary's name remained constant: Saoirse Esperanza Diary — last name Diary. 

My loyalty to the pen petered out in eleventh grade. The reason, as I explained in a Google Doc poem last edited June 17, 2022, was — 

I stopped writing in my diary

and started talking to my friends.

I feel like a teenager.

It’s a constellation of Kodak fireworks in the dark,

the silence of a cue ball hitting its mark.

I’ve never laughed so hard, 

or so much.

Our coming of age is here, on its way out, at the back door, shotgun house,

too fast for me to mark it down in the guestbook Bible.

I try, but what I write is costumed lies

stumbling across an ink-flooded stage,

papier-mâché trying desperately

to convince you it is china.

Maybe when we are done and through

and we avoid each other in supermarket lines and half-alive groupchats,

when there is nothing we can talk about and it used to be that there was nothing we couldn’t talk about

and reunions sound like hell but we suggest them anyways because it’s what we’re supposed to do,

maybe then, I’ll sit myself down

in a cubicle in a city I swore I would never live in and

write to the old confidante

and in retrospect everything will be colored honest and blue.

For now,

the sentences I cannot arrange

the adjectives I cannot find

the moments I cannot put into words

will loiter like mourners

around the stack of books beside my bed.

For now,

people listen better than paper.

I italicized it so you could skip past it more easily — teenage joy-turned-angst is hard to read. But I included it because I find I still like some parts, despite the triteness. TL;DR: So many noteworthy things were occurring in my life, I was so happy with my friendships, & I felt I could not adequately capture my emotions/memories, not at the pace life was moving at. (As a sidenote, the prophecy is coming true — said groupchat is half-alive, I've attended reunions I regretted. *I've yet to see friends in a supermarket line or work in a cubicle — insha'Allah I get a job, cubicle or not, in this economy.)

This blog is not the old confidante. Saoirse has been laid to rest. But I've found myself missing the regular practice of writing; concurrently, I've found myself thinking thoughts (how novel!) & wanting to put them someplace. & though these thoughts are often academic/professional/intellectual (I hate using the word intellectual in self-reference, forgive the pretentiousness!) in nature, I cannot bring myself to post on LinkedIn — I feel like a jester.

Though there certainly remains an element of performance in this blog — if I wanted my thoughts unread, I could've relegated them to Saoirse once more. I'm not sure who my intended audience is, & I'm not sure what balance of professional/personal I'm aiming for here. I think that's something I'll figure out.

But I wanted to have a record somewhere, of Biruni & the becoming of Biruni (I'm thinking about Educated by Tara Westover, the way she writes about education as transformation). I am an archive enthusiast, & I hope this corner of the internet can serve as a lil archive — a documentation/memorialization of me, my studies (inside the classroom & out), & (ideally) my progression.

Bismillah!