Talking to Yourself –
My first combo English-Women’s Studies course in 1975, my first semester back after dropping out for a year, was Women Writers with Elaine Showalter. She required us to keep a journal for the semester, and that set me off on a 48-years-&-counting habit. This is the first paragraph of my first entry.
Have you ever kept a journal? I often recommend it. It helps if you’re any type of writer. It helps if you’re not but have thoughts rushing through your brain, feeling tense with everything going on in your life and in the world. I’ve used it to record thoughts, to test out ideas, to tell off people I would never confront in person, to cry over my dogs who had just died, to revise and revise and revise certain poems. For the past several years, until recently, its primary functions have been for bookkeeping and managing to-do lists.
I recently started using it again for “morning pages,” Julia Cameron’s recommended writing practice. https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/ It’s becoming a fuller journal. I’m on book #138.
As I filled them over the decades, I didn’t think too much about their future use. Their importance was in the moment. But in the past several years, I’ve had specific reasons to go back to them. When a long-time friend was dying from cancer, he asked his crowd to send him things we remembered about him. I was able to go to the journal where I described our first meeting and how we almost went on a date. It made us both smile. I’ve poured through journals from the ‘70s and ‘80s looking for pieces of poems and the several false starts I had to writing about my abortion when I was 19.
Just yesterday I wanted to look up what I’d written in 1988 when I first learned Jonesy (ref. #NanoPoblano Day #28) had been killed. When I moved three years ago, I threw my journals onto their large bookcase, in the order I grabbed them from the packing boxes. They were a mess, and I couldn’t find the right volume for Jonesy, so I decided to put them in order.
They’re all numbered, except this one that must have been from 1987. It’s a record of how chaotic our lives were then with a 4-yr-old, a 2-yr-old, nightly dinner, the print shop, the Robeson book, trying to raise money to fund nightly dinner. The book started as my journal but apparently was there for each of us in the family to use as needed. Most of the to-do lists, random notes, and mailing list names are in my handwriting, but there are several places where Bob grabbed it and made notes and where both kids took to it with crayons and pens. There are the notes about the shelter trailers we tried to get the Freeholders to fund (ref. #NanoPoblano Day #24) and a budget for a proposal we were putting together for a church to let us use their Sunday School building for a shelter. Missing are any thoughts or feelings about what was going on, but a frantic energy is apparent on all the pages.
I wondered what should happen to them after I die. More than once my first husband suggested I burn them then, not waiting to kick off. When I was in my 20s and then in my 40s and 50s doing genealogical research, I thought it would be so cool to come across journals from women in my family. (Never happened.) I’ve wondered if some day one of my progeny would feel the same way and be happy to have the collection. Probably not my children. Who wants to get that close into their mother’s head? Maybe a grandkid or a great-grand. If climate disasters haven’t made everything irrelevant by then.
So for now I’ll just keep churning them out.
I hope you’ll try it too. Get in touch if you’re interested in tips.
