The Rips In My Journal

I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m an avid writer. I’ve been one from an early age. When I was four years old, I had a particularly vivid dream and thought that the idea was pretty neat. As a result, I wrote my first short story on construction paper bound with yarn, entitled “The Man & His Dream.” This masterpiece included riveting passages such as, “Once a man had a dream. ‘Hi Dream!’ said the man.”

That’s riveting stuff.

Besides my ridiculous stab at the Great American Novel, I’ve also kept a journal throughout the majority of my adolescence and young adulthood. Mind you, this isn’t a daily or weekly or even monthly journal. In fact, I’ve forgotten that I even owned this journal for months at a time. It’s brown and leather, and it’s gathered more cumulative dust than the average Bowflex. It’s a journal that chronicles the most defining moments of my life. It’s a record of times that I said, “This is too much. I need to write this down.”

Despite my tendency to relentlessly bitch and moan about the same things over and over, there’s a portion of my journal that’s quite different than the others. In between page after page of relationship ills and existential crises, there’s a section missing. A roughly forty page chunk of my journal has been carefully cutout, leaving a jagged edge to split the pages.

It’s a sight full of cognitive dissonance. This is an obviously well-loved book, stained with coffee and battered to hell. A journal is a best friend and confidant. To rip pages out is almost to destroy that bond.

Obviously, I’m a sentimental kind of person. I still have a giant tablecloth that all of my friends signed to welcome me home from a surgery in 2012. I have letters written to pen pals in high school. I still remember every note of a high school marching band show that I played in 2008. The things that emotionally fulfill me are the records that spin around and around in my head.

Another deep-rooted trait of mine is that I am fiercely passionate about things that I enjoy, particularly the things that I’m enjoying at the moment. I pour myself into the things that I love because, to me, those things become the most important things in my life, for the moment anyway.

So why are there rips in my journal? If I’m such a sappy little nostalgia leech, how could I throw away memories that I cherished, at least at one time?

Sometimes, the things that I’m fiercely passionate about became something worse. They stop being fulfilling. As much as you want to find someone to blame, there’s no blame to go around. Good things don’t fall apart so that better things can fall together. Good things fall apart because they don’t always stay good things for you.

The rips in my journal tell me that sometimes, the things that you love don’t love you back. Emotional fulfillment alone doesn’t constitute healthy attachment. If my journal is a reflection of myself, the rips in my journal are the parts of myself that I don’t want any more.The rips in my journal let it evolve from a biopic about every significant event in my life into a chart showing my own growth. I know what those rips used to hold. There are several passages that I can recite by heart, even now. Those passages were the essence of the most important things in my life for a time. They leave a jagged edge that I can’t cover up.

Every time I flip past those pages, they’ll pause for a moment because the edge is unlike any of the others. I can flip past them, though. I can fill the rest of my journal with today’s passions and the lessons that they continue to teach me. I can reflect on the ripped pages without giving them the power that they used to have over me. I can love just as fervently and surround the ripped pages with words so beautiful that the jagged edge will soon have no choice but to look beautiful too. And I can do the same thing to myself.