My journaling history
Wednesday, February 5th, 2003 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanaleh
(One in an occasional series of ruminative essays on personal topics.)
At Arisia, one of the topics covered at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gnomi's LJ panel was the interrelation between online journaling and paper journaling. How many of us keep regular paper journals in addition to LJ, and if we do both, how do we use them differently?
A whole lot of people said they also keep paper journals. I said that I don't. But this reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten about my earlier journaling practices.
The first time I kept a regular journal was in seventh grade (1983-84), in my Humanities class; this was basically a supplemental gifted-and-talented class, primarily literature-focused, though we also did other cool stuff that was more hands-on. My teacher was this amazing, wonderful, warm woman named Cheryn Maesch, and one of the ongoing elements of the class was journal-keeping; we'd spend a few minutes every day with our spiral notebooks, take them home if we wanted I think, hand them in at the end of each week or two, and she'd look over them -- and make little comments in the margins. Shades of LJ, anyone?
This created enough of a bond for me that somehow, when the year was over, I kept writing in the journal and bringing it back to Mrs. Maesch, long after I no longer had her for class (though lucky for me she moved up to the high school not long after I did, and I think I eventually got to take at least one other class from her). And she, bless her heart, never batted an eye, never suggested it might be time to phase out "le journal" -- but kept taking those ratty notebooks from me and reading them and giving me her comments and taking it seriously and, above all, listening. Which kindness I did not fully appreciate at the time, but in retrospect I am now profoundly grateful.
What did I talk about? Hell if I know. Or rather, I mostly do know and I'm rather appalled: my love life, both existent and nonexistent. My whole life (literally starting from age seven) I had one crush after another, mostly unrequited, so I spent a whole lot of energy and ink grappling with my feelings about this boy or that boy. The one comment that sticks in my mind was the time she wrote, "It seems this is turning into a 'love-journal'!" And though I knew it was true, it basically never occurred to me that perhaps there were other meaningful issues I could contemplate and address. I had thoughts and ideas, but it didn't strike me that I should use that space for them... or perhaps that they were worth elaborating on. (I was mostly a writer of poetry and some fiction at that point, and certainly a voracious reader, but almost exclusively of fiction; it didn't come to me until considerably later that "nonfiction" could include not only the dreaded "expository writing," but also personal reflection and insight on all kinds of truly meaningful, interesting things, and that it was a way of seeking as well as speaking truth. But I digress.)
Anyway -- Cheryn, I just wish you could have known how prophetic that assessment was. My preoccupation with my own romantic angst was a theme that would come up again and again later: when I saw my first therapist (starting the summer after I graduated college and continuing for just over 5 years), he used to say to me regularly, "You're 23 years old. Quit worrying so much about who you {are, aren't, should be} having sex with, and WRITE SOMETHING!" He had me pegged as a frustrated writer busily sublimating my real goals in my sexuality (not to mention my chosen career, manipulating other people's writing). There was undoubtedly some truth in this, as to this day I'm still running from much of the writing that I say I want to do. But at least I've matured into a more well-rounded person, and started investing my energy in at least a few other meaningful questions. And at least I'm taking some steps toward incorporating more writing into my life... starting right here.
I did keep a paper journal in college, but gradually less and less, until I was only really using it when I had a crisis (usually, I admit, of the romantic kind -- see notes above) and needed to sort things out in it. I still have the last notebook I was using, but I haven't written in it in years.
But now there's LJ. In which I suddenly take up the mission of writing things that I actually think about, in addition to the assorted tsuris of my personal life. Maybe it's that I need to feel I have an audience, that someone is actually listening, in order to bother putting my thoughts out.
At Arisia, one of the topics covered at
gnomi's LJ panel was the interrelation between online journaling and paper journaling. How many of us keep regular paper journals in addition to LJ, and if we do both, how do we use them differently? A whole lot of people said they also keep paper journals. I said that I don't. But this reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten about my earlier journaling practices.
The first time I kept a regular journal was in seventh grade (1983-84), in my Humanities class; this was basically a supplemental gifted-and-talented class, primarily literature-focused, though we also did other cool stuff that was more hands-on. My teacher was this amazing, wonderful, warm woman named Cheryn Maesch, and one of the ongoing elements of the class was journal-keeping; we'd spend a few minutes every day with our spiral notebooks, take them home if we wanted I think, hand them in at the end of each week or two, and she'd look over them -- and make little comments in the margins. Shades of LJ, anyone?
This created enough of a bond for me that somehow, when the year was over, I kept writing in the journal and bringing it back to Mrs. Maesch, long after I no longer had her for class (though lucky for me she moved up to the high school not long after I did, and I think I eventually got to take at least one other class from her). And she, bless her heart, never batted an eye, never suggested it might be time to phase out "le journal" -- but kept taking those ratty notebooks from me and reading them and giving me her comments and taking it seriously and, above all, listening. Which kindness I did not fully appreciate at the time, but in retrospect I am now profoundly grateful.
What did I talk about? Hell if I know. Or rather, I mostly do know and I'm rather appalled: my love life, both existent and nonexistent. My whole life (literally starting from age seven) I had one crush after another, mostly unrequited, so I spent a whole lot of energy and ink grappling with my feelings about this boy or that boy. The one comment that sticks in my mind was the time she wrote, "It seems this is turning into a 'love-journal'!" And though I knew it was true, it basically never occurred to me that perhaps there were other meaningful issues I could contemplate and address. I had thoughts and ideas, but it didn't strike me that I should use that space for them... or perhaps that they were worth elaborating on. (I was mostly a writer of poetry and some fiction at that point, and certainly a voracious reader, but almost exclusively of fiction; it didn't come to me until considerably later that "nonfiction" could include not only the dreaded "expository writing," but also personal reflection and insight on all kinds of truly meaningful, interesting things, and that it was a way of seeking as well as speaking truth. But I digress.)
Anyway -- Cheryn, I just wish you could have known how prophetic that assessment was. My preoccupation with my own romantic angst was a theme that would come up again and again later: when I saw my first therapist (starting the summer after I graduated college and continuing for just over 5 years), he used to say to me regularly, "You're 23 years old. Quit worrying so much about who you {are, aren't, should be} having sex with, and WRITE SOMETHING!" He had me pegged as a frustrated writer busily sublimating my real goals in my sexuality (not to mention my chosen career, manipulating other people's writing). There was undoubtedly some truth in this, as to this day I'm still running from much of the writing that I say I want to do. But at least I've matured into a more well-rounded person, and started investing my energy in at least a few other meaningful questions. And at least I'm taking some steps toward incorporating more writing into my life... starting right here.
I did keep a paper journal in college, but gradually less and less, until I was only really using it when I had a crisis (usually, I admit, of the romantic kind -- see notes above) and needed to sort things out in it. I still have the last notebook I was using, but I haven't written in it in years.
But now there's LJ. In which I suddenly take up the mission of writing things that I actually think about, in addition to the assorted tsuris of my personal life. Maybe it's that I need to feel I have an audience, that someone is actually listening, in order to bother putting my thoughts out.
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no subject
Date: Thursday, February 6th, 2003 07:20 am (UTC)My mom bought me a Judy Blume diary when I was in, oh, fifth or sixth grade (when she also bought me about a dozen of her books, which I did like). I made a few sporadic efforts at writing in it, but nothing really took hold. Until later, in high school, when I started using it to record my more graphic sexual feelings (and occasionally experiences) -- something that really *needed* to be private. And those entries were still sporadic, but they served a different and important function.
I stored that diary between the mattress and box spring of my bed, for years. I think I abandoned it in my parents' house altogether, and eventually got it back in one of the boxes of my things they eventually sent me. Which gives me the sinking feeling that my mom must then have looked through it (who could possibly resist that temptation?), and probably been sorry :-} But, thank God, at least I never heard anything about it from her.