Over the weekend, a group of us were discussing our embarrassing first email addresses  and poor choice of screen names. Mine was LatinaVero3, naturally.

LatinaVero3 made her debut on Hi5 and MySpace.com. LatinaVero3 sent out silly MySpace bulletins, rearranged her Top 8 and wrote pointless blogs (things haven’t changed much…). Luckily, most of LatinaVero3’s digital trail vanished but one thing remained…

My middle school diary–a small notebook, decorated with pictures cut out from Pop Star! and American Girl magazines, in which I wrote things I couldn’t post online. There is where my true embarrassment laid.

“My mom is such an antique!” I complained of my old-fashioned mother in my diary, as she once again denied me from doing whatever it is that I wanted to do. “I can’t stand her!”

I attended an American private school while growing up and began learning English at an early age. Some words came easier than most. Some words I used incorrectly. Most of my mistakes documented in my diary.

“I told my teacher I had a headache today and she sent me to the nurse and they combed my hair. I still have a headache,” I wrote. I was not aware that I was mispronouncing the word “ache” as “itch,” making it seem like I was riddled with lice every other day for an entire school year.

Reading those diary entries made me laugh and cringe and I began wondering if my friends kept their childhood diaries. The short answer was no, they didn’t keep them. However, I found two ways to satisfy my curiosity.

The Mortified Podcast is a story-telling series in which adults share diary entries, songs, poems and letters that they wrote when they were younger. One of my favorite episodes (I’ve listened to it three times already!) is episode 58 “Forbidden Crushes Part 3: My secret gay crush,” in which a Scottish woman shares her hilarious diary entries to a crowd about wanting to pour her heart out to her middle school classmate Elizabeth, but never did in fear of outing herself as gay. The episodes are about 20 minutes long and are perfect for car rides, if you don’t mind looking a little bit crazy while wiping tears away from laughing too hard!

And if you’re interested in actually attending one of these diary readings and you happen to live in Orlando, you have to check out Orlando Cringe–real people, reading the intimate thoughts and feelings from their childhood diaries. To complete strangers.

Orlando Cringe hosts these intimate shows about once a month and I’ve happened to be out of the state for each show, but not this time! I’ll be checking out tomorrow night’s show which promises tales of church camp, the insightful childhood of a third grader and a list of all the boys one girl loved (and how much they loved her back!). There are still tickets available for tomorrow. Let’s get angsty!

I’m off to spend the rest of the day in nervous agony as I head to the ophthalmologist to get my pale nerve endings checked out (so scary!). So please keep me entertained! Share some of your embarrassing diary entries below. 

xx