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Opening To My Journals, Finding Myself
Feelings matter. Why has this been so hard to realize?
Boxes of journals gathering dust
Several years ago, I met with a memoir writing teacher for help with mining journals that had accumulated over time. I was convinced that there were valuable insights buried in all that writing but had no clue how to begin excavating and shaping it.
In retrospect, I believe she was overwhelmed by my request. She could see the impossibility of my project, not because of the amount of writing I had amassed over the years, but because of the ambivalence she likely sensed in me. All she could say was that I needed to keep writing and to work with the new stuff. I left our meeting deeply disappointed by what I felt was her lack of useful advice. I had dozens of notebooks that I had kept for years without knowing how to work with them. I wanted to do something with that writing.
Or so I thought.
I kept the journals and continued to create new ones. Every now and then, I would gather enough energy and focus to page through one of the notebooks, underlining and circling as I read.
There were three or four failed attempts to organize the material in various ways — chronologically, thematically, episodically — but with…
