Real Words

 I still have the first diary that I ever wrote in. It’s ridiculously cliche, but it’s a pink diary that originally closed with a lock and key. I was in fourth or fifth grade when I received it as a Christmas present and thus began the habit of chronicling my daily life. I haven’t always kept a journal consistently … there were years when I barely wrote anything at all … but I have never really stopped being a journal writer. At the beginning of this year, I was writing every single morning. Then the writing tapered off and I hadn’t written in my journal in a month until this morning. But whether I write often or rarely, journal-writing has continued to play an important role in my life as a writer.

I’ve gone through many stages of journal writing. Some of these stages are related to the frequency - or lack thereof - of the writing. Some of these stages are related to the mood of the journal (which can sometimes be evidenced by the type of journal or decorative cover that I’ve used on the notebook). And some of these stages are related to the specific way in which I write. Occasionally, I go back through these journals to read about some mostly-forgotten time in my life. Whenever I get lost on my path through creativity, I turn to the journals - starting new ones to help me get through the writer’s block and reading old ones to help remind myself of where I’ve been and where I want to be.

The frequency of my writing has always been an indication of my general state of mind. I cave in to the cliche that I write most frequently in my journal when I am unhappy or confused. This makes sense, because journal writing for me has always been a means of accessing a part of my emotional mind that I can’t seem to get to in any other way. Knowing that I am discontent, I turn to the page and pummel it out through aggressive language until I have revealed what the problem is. Sometimes it is even just the act of writing, not the words that emerge on the page, which provides the catharsis necessary for seeing the answer and moving forward in my life. But this isn’t to say that journal writing is unhappy. I do sometimes journal for the sole purpose of capturing the beauty of a moment that I know I will otherwise forget. I have been known to grab a pen and jot down a funny line in a random conversation just so that I can go back one day when I’ve forgotten that the conversation ever even happened and return to find it there.

In addition to changing frequency in my journals, there has also been a change in the journals themselves over the years. After that first pink diary, I moved on to writing in basic notebooks because I was eleven years old and couldn’t exactly afford anything else. Junior high was rough for me and I wrote every single day to cope with my life. At the end of those two years, I tore every page out of the notebooks and bound them together with yarn. I moved on to high school and rarely wrote any type of journal entry. I was busy, active in my social life and maintained a group of pen pals that served my writing needs. When I began journalling again at the end of high school, I turned towards those decorative journals that can be found lining the clean shelves of bookstores. I worked at a bookstore then and they beckoned. I would go out in search of exactly the right decorative journal that seemed to fit my mood at the time. Sometimes I wouldn’t finish one book before starting another because the heft and design of the journal didn’t “feel right”. The light blue seashell-dotted notebook with fragile handmade paper pages may have felt right when I was light and airy but didn’t work when tossed into a period of depression. The sturdy muted-tone journal lined with the outline of the world was perfect when I had been traveling on my own for work but didn’t suit the immobile me that came home to no job.

After a few years of money spent on the “right journals”, I started using notebooks again. The guy I was dating at the time wrote his journal entries in composition notebooks. When we took off together to travel the country, little cash in our pockets and no plans for income, it seemed to make sense to go his route with the cheap composition notebook instead of paying money for a leather-bound book. Whereas he always wrote in black-and-white notebooks with black ink, I favored colored composition notebooks. I would add a photograph or postcard to the front of the notebook to give it personality. Sometimes I wouldn’t select this image until the book had been almost completely written in, because I hadn’t quite gotten the feel for my mood yet. To this day, those are the journals that I use. The current one is a purple composition notebook. The image on front is a purple-ish postcard picked up at a music festival. It is of the trunk of a purple tree decorated with dancing bodies winding through it … and it speaks to where I was at at the time … dancing through my life contentedly but without a clear notion of where I was.

As the decorative images on the outside of my journals have changed, so has the way that I write within the pages of those notebooks. As a child, I poured everything out exactly as I was feeling it at the time. In junior high, I wrote more in bad poetry than actual full-blown thoughts, a testimony to the heightened emotions of that time. After high school, I poured confusion out on the page through scraps of thought. During a period when I was certain that a loved one was reading my journals, I began writing in a sort of code, writing with the thought that it was being read and often referring to myself only in the third person. Later, I wrote as though I was writing to someone I knew, trying to describe what I was feeling so that I could figure it out. These days, I write more pragmatically. Writing is what I do and I have become comfortable with that. I used to think that I had to write down the facts of everything that had happened, as though articulating it to someone who needed to know. While I still sometimes do this, it is more so I can see the progression of thoughts and activities. I write in my journal now for me and only for me. It is my safe place, my tool … and sometimes it is an annoyance because I want to want to write in it on days that I don’t.

Journal writing is an intensely personal experience. And it’s interesting because it’s a universal experience as well. We read famous journals to get insight into other ways and times of life. We find out that CEOs, fashion models, political leaders and homeless people all keep journals for reasons that are varied and often similar. It’s a fascinating art … and an ongoing interetsing part of my life. Tell me, why do you keep a journal - and what is that experience like for you?

[Tags] writing, writer, journal, creativity, diary [/Tags]

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