Janice Erlbaum | Author of Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir

girl bomb diaries

In 1995, when I was 25, I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and began the practice of “morning pages,” i.e., writing stream-of-consciousness style for 20 minutes per day. This habit continued for the next three decades.

In 2020, in an effort to cut down on the hundreds of pounds of old notebooks I’d been storing, I began to transcribe them using voice-to-text. Once I had all the early journals transcribed, I took pictures of various pages, ripped out a few other pages to keep, and tossed the rest.

(Please note that the word “tossed” here means “ripped up, then went around to at least 15 different garbage cans in various neighborhoods in Manhattan to dispose of the torn scraps, so that nobody would be able to find a whole trove and piece them together somehow.”)

Now I’ve started posting excerpts from the transcripts of my old diaries.

But WHY. WHY AM I DOING THIS. These diary entries are not flattering to me. I’m not proud of many of the thoughts and actions I describe. If 1995 me knew that 2026 me was publishing these for all of cyberspace to read, she would vault through time to kill me.

My main goal in posting these diary excerpts is to show what it looks and feels like to suffer from an undiagnosed personality disorder as the result of childhood abuse. I’ve wrestled with shrinks/myself over the exact diagnosis I might have warranted in the mid-1990s, 20 years before C-PTSD was widely recognized. Officially, I was being treated for Generalized Anxiety, but my symptoms most closely matched the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder.

In fact, when I began these diaries, I fulfilled all nine criteria of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Now, a mere 30+ years later, I fit only one and a half, which makes me approximately 86.5 percent cured.

I started talk therapy within weeks of starting these notebooks; they serve as a record of my first true attempts to get better. I’m hoping this material can help sufferers of disorders like CPTSD and BPD, whether they suffer from their own disorder, or as a result of someone else’s.

This work may also resound with people in their twenties who hate their jobs and parents and co-workers and want to be brilliant artists but are too busy having co-dependent relationships with other trainwrecks to make it happen.

I tried to choose excerpts that I could include word-for-word, but I’ve had to make some edits to preserve other people’s privacy. Most names have been changed.

Please read with caution. This material is explicit, disturbing, and emotionally intense.

Here are the diary posts in chronological order:

April 1995 so fucking angry I wish I was dead

April 1995 yelling at me to get out

April 1995 scarily ready to be alone

April 1995 terrible fucking hurricane of greedy emotion

April 1995 so pathologically indifferent sometimes

April 1995 a thumb-sucking, fit-throwing, pothead psycho

April 1995 a thing nobody wants done

May 1995 I am a terrible person

May 26, 1995 really did act atrociously

June 1995 burn these later