Before the valley, before the envelope, before the navy suit and the spreadsheets, and the three a.m. emails there was a girl in a bedroom with the window open and a notebook she had not written in yet.
Alex at seventeen was not the woman you met in Now or Neverish. She was louder, messier, more likely to laugh at things that were not funny and cry at things that were. Alex argued with her mum about everything and nothing, and ran on Saturday mornings not for discipline but because moving fast through cold air made her feel like she owned the day.
Alex ate toast with much butter and did not think about what that meant for anyone's perception, had a dog called Biscuit and a best friend called Mae who ate KitKats without breaking the bars apart, in her kitchen that smelled like onion soup and Earl Grey.
Alex was also already the one who held things together. You can see the seeds of it in these early entries of her diary - the friend who organises, the daughter who reads the room, the student who is so well prepared that when a colleague in her study group calls her intimidating, she spends an entire evening wondering whether that was a compliment or a diagnosis.
The thing about Alex at seventeen is that she still had space between the doing and the being, and could notice something as simple as a crack in the pavement to sit with a question she could not answer, however she would write three pages about nothing and feel like it mattered.
She had not yet learned that space was something you were supposed to fill with productivity, and had not yet met anyone who would teach her to measure herself by output. The gap between who she was and who she presented to the world was so small you could barely see daylight through it.
That gap would widen, year by year until it was large enough to lose herself!
These early years entries of her journal are raw, full of exclamation marks and afterthoughts and sentences that change direction through. They contradict themselves, overshare and trail off into observations about weather and dogs or what soup smells like when her mum makes it on a Sunday afternoon in autumn.
They sound, in words like someone who has not started performing yet. Someone who writes the way she thinks, which's to say in every direction at once, with a sense of humour that has not been handed down by professionalism and a curiosity that has not been narrowed into a job specification.
That's what makes them worth reading - because they are true, and not polished. This is who Alex was before the world started editing Alex, a version of herself that will spend a decade forgetting and a valley trying to remember.
Hold on to Alex - she's going to need you to.