If, years later, you find a ballad or a poem you wrotein high school for a crush, or kept a journal or diary where you chronicled life?s mundane details, you?re almost sure to be horrified at the emotional intensity of it and surprised by how much effort went into creating it.

David Nadelberg knows this feeling well. In the late 1990s, he found a letter in a shoebox he had written to a high school crush.