Since I love diaries and journals so much, I had to interrupt my sequence on dream statements because I wanted to share this link (found because @PlaitedDragon tweeted about it):
The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives’ – Slide Show – NYTimes.com http://goo.gl/sneQB
Tomorrow I’ll be back with more thoughts about how to wrangle the subconscious some more.
1-10-11 I forgot my laptop bag in the jeep. How I managed to do that is beyond me, but it must have had something to do with the snow. I guess I was so preoccupied with dusting the snow off my car that I forgot to put my bag in there when I swapped vehicles.
That means not only have I left my laptop, but also my keys to the lab, flash drive, journal and reading materials (not that I ever have spare time to read, but I carry them just in case I am held up in traffic or something unexpected like that).
So it’s leaving the flash drive and journal that bothers me most of all. I’ve resorted to writing this entry on plain unlined printer paper. It’s not nearly as gratifying as writing in my journal, but at least I can write. To have no outlet at all would truly drive me insane. Leaving the flash drive bothers me just because it contains all my writing and photographic efforts for the past couple years. I forget it every once in a while and always feel uncomfortable until it is once again in my possession.
I guess the need to physically write things down is an obsession, or a compulsion. Once I was able to write this entry, even on the plain paper, I felt able to get on with the day. Even though 90 percent of the time, nothing I write in my journal is *important*, I still feel better after doing it.
Not all writers feel this urge to keep journals. But I think most do write things down as they think of them, whether on scraps of paper or in a notebook. With me, it doesn’t seem to matter whether what I’m thinking is useful to a story or just thoughts in my head, I need to write it to get it out of there.
On a crisp evening in October 2008, the first influential domino fell.
That night embers dimmed and glowed, bellowed with the gentle breeze. Sheets of paper-thin ash, words still visible, wavered before crumbling. Some floated off in huge flakes, disintegrating with my memories on the wind.
Something significant changed. Another chunk of my heart hardened and died, but it was the tipping point.
This time the domino hit another.
He’d been wanting me to get rid of my journals for as long as he’d known me. Too much was in there from my past that made him uncomfortable. He shouldn’t have eavesdropped on my private conversations with myself.
The past wasn’t a secret. But my reflections of it, recordings collected over years of tribulation and triumph, were private. Sacred.
Some of these memories were priceless. How much my children weighed at birth, how long the labor took, cursing over the nurse with long fingernails who kept checking dilation… that sort of thing.
A page lifted in the heat vector, rippled and crumbled. Another domino fell.
Many entries were not so benevolent. In my out loud conversations I am discerning, restrained, and usually soft-spoken.
My journaling language is not. No holds barred, damn the torpedos, full-steam ahead. Anger, hatred even, resentment, sorrow and humiliation allowed full expression. Supposedly safe between the covers of the book that gave them life. My shadow side.
The argument that pushed my buttons and led to the bonfire isn’t important. What is important is that I willingly sacrificed myself in an attempt to appease. What is important is that he didn’t want that part of me acknowledged, to exist.
Notebooks piled in boxes in the attic, tucked on shelves and one always close at hand, ready to receive whatever pressing thoughts I needed to release from my mind. I gathered them and brought them to the fire-side, two full boxes and an armful of defiant stragglers.
Tears blinded me and I refused to look at the words before putting them in the flames. About halfway through, I realized what I was doing. And then I tossed the rest on. More than 25 years of history. My history.
Dominos fell, tap, tap, tapping the next one in line.
My journals represented me. They recorded the parts of my life that were either too painful to hold onto or too fleeting to grasp. Sometimes the pages held ugly words and thoughts that never needed to see the light of day.
Always plagued with memory loss, long and short-term, I’ve relied on the written word to help me through. I read them during moments of self-introspection or to remember why I felt a certain way about certain things. To see if I’d grown or fallen into an undesired pattern.
The last domino fell. Reverberating aftershock imprinted on my soul a new pattern.
Tonight’s blog post is going to be about my journals. How many of you keep writer’s journals, or personal diaries?
I’ve kept them since I was about 10 years old, mainly as personal journals where I record my thoughts, feelings, desires, and fears. I also record the anger, dissatisfaction, and other things too ugly to keep locked away in my mind.
When something bothers me, if I don’t write it down, it continues to bother me. If I write it in my journal, all is better.
My memory is awful. If I write it down, I can look back to refresh my memory. Even good memories slip away too quickly. For an example of how bad my memory can be, when I had to punish the kids, I would write down the reason and post it on the refrigerator. Otherwise I would forget why they were punished after the first day.
Somehow, though, the things I really need to remember for day to day life stay in place. Like the important stuff, how to get to and from work, to feed kids and animals, etc. And my job, which requires a tremendous amount of memory space. That may be why I can’t remember the other details.
Tell me about your journals – do you keep one? Are they extremely private, or are they only a source of writerly notes? Are they precious storehouses of memories?
In my next blog post, I’ll tell you what happened to over 20 years’ worth of my journals.
How many of you keep journals – writer’s journals or diaries? I have been for years, without fail until recently, recording the highs and lows of my life.
This week I decided to write an essay about my journals and the troubles they’ve caused my relationships. At first the idea was to submit the essay somewhere, but I’m wondering if it might be too personal.
Do you think anyone (writers in particular) can relate to a story about a lifetime of journaling?
