50 Years of Journaling

Tomorrow is an important anniversary. It will mark 50 years of journaling. 50 years of “explaining my own life to myself.”1

On October 16, 1975, I picked up my groovy pen with 4 different colors of ink - red, blue, black and green - clicked the blue lever and wrote my first journal entry. I wrote about how I thoroughly disliked practicing my clarinet, which wasn’t going well since I wasn’t actually practicing, but spending 30 minutes writing instead. If I’d known this would be the beginning of a 50-year habit I would have considered a more worthy subject for my first entry. Something along the lines of my dreams of becoming a haiku-ing author someday.

In my elementary years, I tried to keep a regular habit of journaling but the practice never stuck. Yet in my 8th grade year, life took a sudden and adventurous turn. My days were full of exciting drama, romance, and intrigue which kept my multicolored pen in steady business.

For years, I continued writing about the predictable life of a Teenage Drama Queen. I wrote furiously through my first crush (Bruce), my first heartbreak (Jim), and my first $2.30-per-hour job (Mr. Gatti’s Pizza). I wrote about my first driving lesson with the Army drill sergeant who’d only been out of the military a few short weeks (terrifying), and my first solo drive with my best friend on the day I got my license, when I backed out of a Jack in the Box drive-through without my order because I was late for curfew. (An impressive feat for someone who barely knew how to drive forward, much less in reverse.)

But I didn’t just write about my own personal soap operas. I also chronicled the world’s drama: presidential elections, America’s Bicentennial celebration, the hostages held in the embassy in Tehran, the oil and gas crisis of the 70s with long gas lines that stretched for blocks, and various hurricanes (these entries were written in a “hostile environment,” as Dad liked to say). Granted, most of these news events were minor characters in the soap-opera story of my teenage angst, but at least I made note of them.

As I grew up, my journaling habit waxed and waned. My parent’s separation and divorce during my high school and college years didn’t receive much pen-to-paper time, which I find curious now that I’m older. I remember it was an enormously devastating event in my teenage years, but I rarely wrote about it. Was I hoping it would all go away if I put my head in the sand?

I noticed a trend across the decades of my life. Major life-altering events received only minor mentions in the footnotes of entries, while the relatively insignificant details of my life received top billing. Why was that? I’ve come to realize this trend of minimizing difficulties and struggles was my way of ignoring the pain. Of course, now I’ve learned unprocessed pain never goes away, it just shape-shifts into something else, something we don’t recognize until it shows up years later as heart palpitations or panic attacks.

But in my earlier decades of writing, I noticed the tendency to minimize and gloss over the hard struggles in life, and I had plenty in my first 22 years. It wasn’t until I reached my late 40s that I began to see the toll of these unprocessed hurts. As Frederick Buechner wrote, “To lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly, but spiritually.”2 I felt the impoverishment of my heart and soul keenly.

At this point, my journal became the place where God began a great restoration process in me. He took the frayed edges of my life story along with my desperation, and helped arrange the words on paper into a coherent pattern that began to enlighten my understanding. It was only by reflecting on my past that my present began to come into view.

Again, quoting Frederick Buechner:

“It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing, which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose to be healed by all these years later.”3

I didn’t know it at the time, but my 8th grade self threw me a lifeline with the simple act of picking up that multi-colored pen and Mead spiral notebook instead of practicing my clarinet. My instrument went by the wayside after high school along with almost everything I owned that couldn’t fit into a VW Bug, but the journals stuck by me for decades. Thus began a lifetime of writing to learn how to live.

 50 Years Later
     Words tumble off the
     page at my feet; I gather
     them up before some-
     one can see, and re-
     arrange them on the page. Years
     later I trust they'll
     tell a story which
     can only be understood
     by reading backwards.