Rabbit Write

To me the beauty of journaling is that it’s  rough and entirely personal; it is a tool for self discovery and self expression that probably will be mortifying at times. I have stacks of beloved journals from the past few years and with them, I think I’ve finally unlocked the mysterious padlock on why journaling is essential. That being said, I’ve not always had a steady relationship with my journals.

There is importance made out of journaling, as though your diary is this grand life record for the future generations. But it seems that if there is anything to learn from the scores of teen diary readings that have popped up in recent years, it is that keeping a journal can cause major embarrassment. The word “diary” even carries with it a cringe-effect.

The  first journal I remember being excited about was a gift for my ninth birthday. It was a “Precious Moments” diary, complete with lock and key. The only entry I can recall making was in third grade when my art teacher was arrested for possession of pot. I remember calling it “pot” then, too.

When I was 15, I felt the need to document how juicy my life had suddenly  become. I ripped the few entries from the precious moments journal and gave the pastel diary an interior re-design, filing it with my steamy make-out accounts and escapades of Zima drinking and “pot” use.

I came home one Summer night to find that the doe-eyed cartoon children and padlock did not protect my private writings. My Mother had broken into my diary and was furious. She screamed and threatened, incessantly asking what it meant that I’d “practically  had sex” with my ex-boyfriend. She had totally crossed my boundaries and broken any trust I had with her, yet I barely noticed because 1.) I was ashamed and scared as hell and 2.) There were little to no boundaries in my parent’s house to begin with, so it seemed normal. Guilty and paranoid, I corrected the sentence in question, inserting the word “almost” before practically, because we actually hadn’t had sex.

My bad-girl journals weren’t  long for this world. I threw them away a few years later, mortified, intending only to write poetry and recount serious thoughts and insights in my new, mature journals.

These serious journals proved to be more embarrassing than the previous batch and were tossed in my early 20’s. They were replaced by rainbow colored stacks of composition notebooks full of thoughts, taped-in memorabilia, dreams, sketches and accounts of my life.

I found the composition notebook to be the perfect journal medium. I usually fill a notebook  each season, finishing just as I begin craving a fresh journal. Beginning a journal in a composition notebook is much less daunting than in a proper diary where the pressure for “precious memory” content is high and there is no telling when it’s 500 tiny pages will get filled.

The composition notebooks began to stack becoming an extension of myself and I treasured them as prized possessions. When I was 22 and living with my two closest friends I kept this stash of journals in a shoebox under my best friend’s bed — with her permission, of course. At the time this felt like the safest place for them.

That was until she unexpectedly moved back home, taking my journals with her. “Well, it’s not like you are never going to see me again” was her calculated response, when I reacted with anguish and panic.

I was re-playing my Mother breaking into my journal all over again. Just as in childhood my boundaries were completely violated, I was manipulated and put in an impossible situation, and just as in childhood I didn’t fully grasp this. As the months passed and she held my journals captive, I thought I’d just have to let them go.

In those months as I began to really reflect and transform my life, I created boundaries for the first time. A year after my journals had gone, I began to feel the anger and hurt that should have instantly accompanied their kidnapping. I went to across state lines to retrieve my journals, which the old friend left on the ground by a mailbox, refusing to talk to me — and that was that.

In that year I had grown and changed significantly. Flipping through my old notebooks there was quite a bit of writing and experiences to feel rosy-cheeked about, but rather than focusing on the embarrassment, I was amazed at how much I had grown. I was happy and surprised that I had recorded so much of my life from then, I realized these journals held the key to processing the past, to understanding myself and to further growth.

Memories get distorted, highlighted, and forgotten; it is part of life. These days there are so many ways to capture what you are feeling, thinking and experiencing in the moment. Whether it’s notebooks, google docs, a handheld audio recorder, a moleskin, or twitter and whether it’s sketching, poetry, leaving yourself voice mails, writing letters to your future self, or traditional what-I-did-today journaling there seem to be endless ways to capture snapshots of your life. To look back at even daily minutia years later can be truly rewarding and expanding, it is a window into the truth about your past. As I’ve worked through my past, the journals have been a great help, I now only wish that i had the full spectrum of my life’s journals, as embarrassing as they might be.

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