On Journaling

I’m sitting here trying to recall the last time I actually wrote something. By that I mean putting pen or pencil to paper and scrawling some bit of creativity. I used to keep a physical journal, but when I made the decision to have a digital journal instead I left the physical by the wayside. Some days I miss it, but I type a lot faster than I write, so I don’t leave as many thoughts behind anymore.

But my journals, I can’t let them go. I’ve collected journals for as long as I can remember. I used to find them everywhere, from dollar stores to TJ Maxx, and other random places. I bought them for as low as 50 cents, and as much as 10 dollars, and they’re all special to me.

Every day I used to write in one or another of them, from a few words to several pages worth of thoughts. No matter how much I wrote, though, I was buying journals faster than I could fill them. That was one of the reasons I decided to write out here. Because in a sense it’s always full and never full at the same time.

Once in a while I dig through the tote that holds my journals and I marvel at their covers, from the antique looking ones to the art deco prints, the covers are as disparate as the range of things I write. I used to keep my styles of writing separate too, with one journal for poetry, one for short fiction, and so on, so to look back through them is to go back to a world where I kept things in compartments.

But my writing now, it’s beyond compartmentalizing. It’s past even being for just me anymore. I’ve had so many conversations about my writings because of my blogs, and I’ve gotten inspired more by others who have read them, conversations and inspirations that never would have happened if I kept my thoughts only locked up inside those beautiful journals.

For over 1,600 days I wrote journal entries out here, and as I wrote each one I thought about where it would fit if I were to put it into one of my many journals. I thought about how it would look if I took out a pen or pencil and copied it down in that journal. But I also shook my head because I’ve moved on. If at some point in time I decide to start using those journals again the writings will look different. Because I’m not the same guy who wrote in them back then.

And my handwriting is a lot worse now too. It’s a trade-off I don’t mind too much.

Sam