EVENTUALLY, INEVITABLY: BUILDING A JOURNAL

This probably goes without saying, but I was a bookish child. I loved the written word. Sure, that meant I loved reading, but it also meant I loved writing. I wanted a pen pal so badly but settled for writing letters to my family. I came up with stories and tried to put them down into picture books but gave up due to my frustrating lack of skills at illustration. And I wanted to keep a diary so badly. I wanted to keep all my secrets and deep thoughts locked away in pretty notebooks decorated with horses or gems and that had cute little locks on the side that could probably have been broken if anyone gave them a hard stare á la Paddington Bear.

My love for keeping a diary was marred by a few unfortunate practicalities. One, I was seven. I had no secrets, not really. Anytime I stumbled upon anything that might even resemble a secret, it was no more than twenty minutes before I ran to share it with my mother. Even at that tender age, I knew a secret wasn’t really a secret if you told somebody. That left my deep thoughts, but again, I didn’t really have any. I had my emotions, but as I’ve shared in the past, I’ve never been really all that keen on focusing on my emotions. Turns out, even if I’d had something interesting to write, I lacked any sort of discipline to write regularly. I may write for three days in a row before I completely gave up the enterprise. Then I’d see a new shiny journal on the shelf as my family waited in the checkout line at TJ Maxx, and I was so sure that if I just had this beauty to write in, I’d be able to finally buckle down and write daily, beautiful musings in transcendent prose. My indulgent mother would spend the $4.99 to give young me a new lease on my writerly dreams. And within a week at the most, that new journal would join the pile of empty others with only a handful of their pages marred by my truly abhorrent penmanship.

This went on for years, until high school. Somewhere in my high school journey, I found in my possession a blank journal. Its covers were decorated in varying shades of pastel purple and had a bird on the front. I made a few entries, but, as always, I soon stopped. But when the urge next struck me to put pen to parchment, I didn’t look for a new journal. I picked up my little purple friend and continued filling its pages. I shared a lot of my thoughts, to be sure, but I also used the journal to take notes of sermons at church. This practice helped me two-fold. One, it kept my mind from drifting off during the sermon, and, two, it made it so I was in my journal practically every week. I may have missed a service now and then, but the journal was never far from my mind. Journaling wasn’t a daily practice, but it was a regular practice, and I kept at it until finally, after years, I finished the journal. From cover to cover, this book was filled with things I had written. I was thrilled with the accomplishment.

My next journal, a woven red hardcover from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian gift shop, didn’t see as many sermon notes. I certainly didn’t write every day or even every week. In fact, months would go by when I wouldn’t pick up my journal at all. But eventually, inevitably, I would come back to its pages. I kept going until finally it too was filled from cover to cover. Through this sporadic and yet consistent practice, I have filled out close to five journals in a little under a decade. That’s an average of two years per journal, which, honestly, I’m happy with.

My handwriting is still atrocious but is at least now legible. I still don’t have very many secrets, but a handful can be found in the pages of my journals. My thoughts still aren’t that deep, but they are getting deeper. Sometimes when I jot them down, I’ll remember something I wrote a year or two ago and marvel at how much, or how little, my perspective on life has changed. A lot of the stuff I write down is just my emotions, which can still be boring and is certainly not my favorite topic, but I’ve come to rely on my journals as a way to care for my mental and emotional health. Mostly I just write about things that have happened to me over the course of the day and how I felt about it. It’s not scintillating reading, which is why I rarely, if ever, read my journals. I don’t write in my journals to read them. I write in them to write in them because when I do write it gets some of the noise out of my head and out onto the page. I might have seasons, months even, when I will journal daily, and during those times I always feels amazing. But I can still go months without putting one word down on the page, and that’s okay too. Because eventually, inevitably, when my brain feels like it’s going to explode – I know I have to journal, and I know I can.

My journaling practice, so to speak, isn’t perfect. I still haven’t achieved that ideal that seven-year-old me had in her mind, but I’m way closer to it than she ever was. (I’m not picking on seven-year-old me. She’s a child. I’m just saying, progress has been made.) And I believe I will continue to improve. It’s a boring formula, persistence plus time, but it’s an effective one. Do something often enough, and, eventually, inevitably, it has to become easier. It’s just one of those laws of the universe. But the thing is I don’t love journaling now because I’m better at it. I love it for what it is. I’m imperfect. I love things imperfectly. But, as I’ve found with journaling, imperfection is no reason to stop loving something altogether. I still have trouble applying that lesson to other parts of my life, but that’s okay too. I just need to keep trying and give it time.

#personal #sundry