When I got my first journal as a gift for my eighth birthday, I took it with me everywhere--to school, to piano lessons, to the park. It was as if I had a secret friend with my wherever I went. I could confide in this friend of mine about how much my brothers bugged me or how my sister wouldn't let me be Princess Leia when we played Star Wars with the neighbor boys.
As the years went by, I filled journal after journal with my most private thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I imagined an audience reading about my oh-so-dramatic life after I died, and I would address this audience directly, asking them to please not be too hard on me and all my foibles. Sometimes I spoke to my journal as if it were a living thing, able to offer me counsel.
All through college I wrote, wondering about whether the young man I had my eye on felt the same way, stressing out over the next exam, complaining about my dormmates and how they could be a little quieter coming in at 2:00 in the morning. When I lived overseas at age 20, I recorded every sight and sound and taste and feeling when my senses practially burst with new experiences. And after college, when life on my own brought a confusing combination of apprehension and excitement, I continued to scribble until late in the night, sometimes blurring the ink with tear drops.
Several journals came with me when I packed up my belongings and went to China to teach English for a few years. Through the wonder and excitement, the homesickness and lesson planning, the pages of my journals continued to fill with a slightly slanted hand. In those years, though, paper was gradually replaced with computer, as my hand could not keep up with my thoughts, and it was mostly through letters to others that I told my story.
When I returned to the United States, life was full of work and friends and activities, and at some point, I stopped confiding in journals and started confiding in other people. I didn't have much to write about any more, and I could barely fill one book in a year. I tried to start again. I remembered the wonderful that release writing in a journal had brought me. I tried using the computer too, but even that couldn't lure me to commit my life to record. When I met my would-be husband, I picked up a legal pad and recorded each moment of our courtship; I realized these were moments I would likely forget but wanted to remember. And after the courtship ended and the wedding took place, I never really kept a journal again.
Now I feel like I've lost a piece of myself. I always thought I'd never forget the important things, but as memories blur together, I confuse one year with the next. It's sad, really, that some memories are so deeply hidden I can't seem to find them. Oh I have plenty of pictures and e-mails and other memories, but it was those thoughts I only thought once and those feelings I only felt once that I lost.
And so here I am now, with my 365-day blog challenge (an idea I borrowed from my brother). I decided that I wanted to keep a blog instead of a journal because keeping a blog means connecting at some level with other people. It means sharing experiences that other people might very well relate to...or that people might find foreign and strange. There's something in me that makes me want to tell my story, even if it's not glamorous or even particularly interesting. As John Donne so famously said, "No man is an island entire of itself," so I desire to live not in isolation but as part of a community. I desire to share and to grow and to contribute, and these are things I can't do if I'm floating alone in the middle of the ocean.
John Donne was reflecting on the end of his life. My life begins new each day. Here's to making the most of it!
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