Journals

I kept journals for the majority of my teenage years. In my early twenties, I went back and catalogued them with their dates on the covers using index cards and tape. The earliest journal I have labeled is from 2005. The last journal I have labeled dates to 2013. I have another journal I've written in from 2013 to the present but it is not finished and therefore not labeled. I don't write in it often anymore, but if I have private thoughts, that's the journal I add it to.

I never used anything fancy. The one subject college rule notebooks were my go-to. They were cheap and easy to find. The colors were a plus. These notebooks are the ones you would have been after if you wanted to know my deepest darkest secrets in high school. 

The oldest notebook is 20 years old!

Nobody cares about my secrets anymore. Honestly, I don't even remember half of what's in these journals.  Will I ever go back and read them? Probably not. I don't think I want to reread any of them because they're cringey and full of my past I'd honestly rather forget. My husband asked me if I would just get rid of them. No, I wouldn't do that either. There's something sacred about having so much of my life chronicled within the pages of notebooks. I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but for now, they're taking up real estate in a cardboard box.

I did retrieve one journal which I did want to reread. This journal was a portion of my lab credits for my first college English class as a senior in high school. I didn't take AP English my senior year and I never regretted it. I had the best professor who is still my friend today. I retrieved this journal and did want to reread it because I had turned it into my professor once upon a time as a portion of my grade. It wouldn't hold my deepest secrets, but it had to include something worthwhile.

It was a quick read. There were 30 entries written, each in three paragraphs of approximately three sentences. That was the requirement to earn our lab credits. As an adult reading my writing, it was still a little cringeworthy. Maybe I say that because it was my own life I was reading about. I was very much a 17/18 year old high schooler working part-time after school with the same struggles that most teenagers have - emotional turmoil, friendship, and the woes of my job. I can't say there's anything profound about the writing within this notebook and it won't be making any bestseller lists, but I enjoyed rereading it.

Had I not gone through and reread this journal, I would have forgotten about the memory when I drove through a rich neighborhood with a friend and admired the fancy houses and large yards. I would have forgotten about the memory when I took my friend's girlfriend shopping for a homecoming dress when I barely knew her at the time. I would have forgotten about the time my grandmother called my dad's cell phone number by mistake instead of dialing mine because she got confused. And although these are rather "insignificant" memories in the grand scope of life, they were fun memories to relive and relearn about myself. 

Unearthing my journals made me reminisce and miss the time when I used to have to just sit and write. As I write this blog, I'm racing against time knowing I have to change out of my loungewear and get to work in less than 45 minutes. Yes, I work from home and my "office" is probably 30 feet from where I'm sitting as I write this, but it's a mental item which needs to be completed. Life has drastically changed for me. Where I used to have time to sit on the carpet of my bedroom floor and write in journals about boys, I now make sure I have enough food in the refrigerator, leave the house on time to pick up my child from school to make sure she's not forgotten, and make sure the credit cards and utility bills get paid on time. 

Considering the fact that I have forgotten to pay a credit card bill (I believe 2 to be exact), forgotten about a scheduled city permit check (I was a week postpartum with my first!), and forgotten countless times to close the washing machine so the load would start washing and instead having to refill the washer a second time because of the automatic drain feature, the headspace to be able to sit down and reflect on life and write about "simple happenings" doesn't happen much anymore.  There are so many of these everyday events and moments which are not logged because there simply wasn't time or energy to sit down and do it. 

The decade or so of my life which lives within these journals will forever be remembered as a painful but special time of my life because there may never be another decade in which I write so many things down so meticulously. I used to want to remember everything I could in my head and keep it as a memory. As I got older, memories naturally faded and only the most prominent and significant stay long-term. And honestly, it's probably better that way. These will be there if I ever want to revisit them.

For now, I don't.