Your Journal Is a Vessel of Being
Perhaps our words are meant to vanish
“This book never gets written in, except when there’s nothing to write.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote that line in her journal. I’ve written similar passages in my journals. I’ve kept journals since I was seven, and I’ve questioned the endeavor in many different ways over the years, starting with the question of if I want my journals to be read, and if not, why I keep them, and if so, who do I want to read them (more on that and the notion of conflagration below)?
I received my first journal for my seventh birthday after staring at it in the stationery shop on the town square for ages. All writers are fetishists of writing materials, and I loved this journal for its stately brown cover, its bound pages, and the lock affixed to it.
It was a fragile little lock, with a fragile little key, but it introduced me to the idea that the best writing happens in secret, that there are words in our souls that no one else should ever see.
But I didn’t know what to write when I first opened it. I was disappointed to discover that the pages had been divided into five sections because it was a five-year journal. I immediately knew a journal should never be defined by boundaries of any sort. Those small spaces were too limiting for even a…
