20 Excerpts from Kayla’s Elementary School Journals, 1998-2003

Welcome to Excerpts From My Super-Secret Diary, an A+ feature for Silver & Gold members in which we publish for you some of our incomplete and/or highly personal thoughts we’ve written down, usually with actual pens. Today, Kayla presents some very on-brand excerpts from her elementary school journals.

I’ve heard it said that our personalities are fully formed by around age 7. First grade. We are the people we are always going to be by the time of first grade. Now, I firmly believe that we don’t have just one fixed self. We are many versions of ourselves as we age, our lives and tendencies shaped by all that we encounter. But I do buy into the idea that our core personalities are on full display in early childhood.
I have been writin...

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 935 articles for us.