Post #18-My Personal History

Over the last month and a half, I have been working on my personal history. The way I formatted my personal history was by placing it on a Calc (a free LibreOffice version of Excel) spreadsheet and assigning different pages of the spreadsheet different years of my life. Each page consists of list of chronologically-ordered dates. For example, my 2000-2002 page on the spreadsheet starts in Spring 2000 and ends in Fall of 2002. The very first page is an introduction to aid navigation through my history. This first page also contains two disclaimers. The first one is that my history is subject to revision because I remember other important evenets in my past and record them after the initial compilation, and I will eventually add current events once I arrive in the present. The second disclaimer is that my history contains some pretty strong commentary and rebukes against certain aspects of my past.
We have all heard the adage "The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is right now". I have used the principle behind this adage by writing my personal history. I look back to my life at Spokane Valley, Washington, when I was seven to ten years old, with much fondness due to the quaint old bungalow my family lived in and the adventurous half-acre yard that we had. I wish I had kept a journal when I was eight years old of those great events at that house, but I can still record that past in my history today, because if I try to do so in the future I will forget that past even more.
Writing this personal history of mine has been a very awarding task to me. In one way it is rewarding is that as I write through certain times of my life, I feel a vestige of the aura of that time. For example, as I was writing about the end of my senior year and the high school graduation, I felt semi-forgotten feelings of hopelessness (with my computer drawings for architecture), triumph (when I karaoke-sang the Linkin Park song "In the End" at my senior all-night party), and relief (when I get an A in my architecture class after the ordeal with the drawings).
Another way that me writing my personal history has been rewarding is that the trends of the time period I write in bring back semi-forgotten memories of other landmark events in my life at the time. In other words, me writing down my past helps me to remember more of it. The result is a fairly thorough summary of my past.