"I love to write! It explains everything you feel better than telling somebody. Because when you say it, nobody knows what you are talking about. But when you write, you know, and you are the only one who needs to know. Then why write? Because it’s more fun and you can look at it and remember it."
I wrote that at eleven and a half, in 1976, about six weeks after my mother died of cancer. It's clear that I already thought feelings were there to be "explained," a habit it's been hard to lose.
My feelings then were of lostness and dread, worry and fear. I feared and resented impending puberty and all the expectations that would come with it that didn't suit me.
I hadn't tried to talk about these feelings. They took the form of wordless mental pictures, a brain backdrop of a destroyed landscape, mud and rocks. My way of putting it into words -- though only in my mind -- was "dread" and "there's almost always something hanging over my head."
My journal was the closest thing I had to a witness or a therapist. Mainly, I vented about things and kids I didn't like, and I crowed about anything that was fun. I had three steady and loving best friends, but if I shared my feelings with them it would have been by acting them out.
At twelve and thirteen, expressions of new feelings mortified me even on rereading them the very next day. I remember that I hoped someday I wouldn't be embarrassed by what I wrote. But even in my 40s, diving into old journal entries overwhelmed me with embarrassment and I couldn't keep reading. I can see now that my vulnerability as a kid was still so raw that I had to protect myself from it.
But in 2017, I dived into my college journals to look up somebody's name. I found what I wanted, then sat on the floor and flipped through more notebooks, bracing myself to be appalled as usual. To my surprise, this time, embarrassment was cancelled out by curiosity and the thrill of seeing into my experiences. Finally I had developed the perspective to see my young writings as fragments of the universal difficulty of growing up. I could see the normal kid in the motherless girl who felt so inadequate. I may have been extra vulnerable as a tween, or extra self-protective, given that I knew I had no guide. But growing up is hard for everybody.
I'm glad I've never had a strong temptation to destroy my journals. I knew I could ignore them for as long as I wanted, and that has paid off. I've learned so much from them, about my life and my emotional system. And I've been able to create detailed timelines that are helping me write my memoir. I don't know who I would be without my journals.
This post was inspired by this one.