Last night I didn’t sleep well. (No more coffee at midnight, Marcus.)

This afternoon I sorted through random papers and old cards I found yesterday while cleaning my room and decided what to keep, what to throw away. This project went on for hours. (I found a lot of old school and summer camp papers in the garage.) In one journal I flipped through, a younger me referred to my one-and-only sister as a “cluts, ideate, and brat.” (Ironic that I couldn’t spell idiot correctly, I know.) I have no idea why I wrote this about her, but–for the record–my opinion has changed.

My all-or-nothing, black-or-white personality has a tough time with sorting projects like these. Part of me wants to keep everything, every little scrap of paper. Another part of me wants to light every fucking bit of it on fire. (What good is a twenty-five-year-old get-well card from a friend from high school?) But today I tried to compromise. From summer camp, I tossed the training manual but kept the pictures. From school, I threw away notes from other people (except a few notes I took pictures of) but kept anything of mine that looked like a journal, short story, or writing assignment. After all, I am a writer, and it might be helpful to go back at some point and see where I started, maybe glean some story ideas.

One of the my other deciding factors in what to keep and what not to keep had to do with things that were dated and made reference to significant events in my life–personal injuries (one note today gave the exact date of when our neighbor threw a hammer over the fence and thus hit me on the head), car accidents, when my dad was arrested. Not that I love thinking about these traumatic experiences, but having a timeline of major moments in my life gives me a lot of compassion for myself. Earlier while looking at my kindergarten, first, and second grade pictures, I thought, What a cute kid, and now it gives me pause considering everything he’s been through in the last thirty years.

It makes me go easier on myself.

As if being an adult is easy, I don’t know how children deal with hard stuff. In one letter I found yesterday, a friend said, “Marc, I’m sorry about your car accident and your dad getting arrested.” I was fourteen. First my Dad and sister and I got broadsided in our Honda Accord and flipped two and a half times down Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith. Then a month or two later, the thing with dad. Not that I’d forgotten about either event, but until I read my friend’s letter, I didn’t realize they were back to back. That’s so much for a teenager, for anyone really. Why do I not remember being overwhelmed?

What I do remember–after the car accident–is my hip hurting. It wasn’t broken, but badly bruised. My friend even mentioned it in their letter. “I hope your hip feels better.” It’s the same hip that gives me trouble twenty years later. Some nights I lie in bed and can feel how tight it is. It’s not always painful, but it’s always there. I can’t prove that it hurts now because of the car accident, but I’m guessing that’s where it started. Plus, I really do believe that our bodies mirror our emotional experiences, and what with dad’s arrest happening right after the wreck, well, it was like getting hit twice.

Now it’s just after midnight, and I’m exhausted. I hit a wall earlier this evening, and the only thing that’s going to fix it is going to bed. Hit a wall–there’s an interesting phrase. I look back at that teenage kid, the one who got knocked around a good bit by life. He never slowed down, never rested. The summer after his dad was convicted, he started working at summer camp. Today I found a “letter log” he kept that first year at camp of all the people he was reaching out to, asking, “How are you?” Now I think, Marcus, you were taking care of everyone except yourself. So I’m determined to do that now–to take care of myself–to slow down–to rest. That kid and I have been through a lot. No wonder we’re tired.