My first journal
Feb. 17th, 2019 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosThis evening I embarked on a project of going through my bin of old paper journals and labeling each one with its dates. I've decided that it's time to go back and re-read them, index them, and then start writing my memoir about my intersecting sexual and spiritual experiences.
Rather to my surprise, what I believe is my first journal was near the top. . .
Yes, it's titled "My Fair Notebook." I had a tendency toward the dramatic from a very young age.
I didn't write the year anywhere in it, and only a couple of items are actual journal entries with any dates at all. When young, every year is so unique and vivid that writing down the number seems superfluous. But since the first entry is about winning the citizenship award at the end of sixth grade and there's a mention of Star Wars in it, it actually is fairly easy to determine that it was written in the summer of 1977, between my sixth and seventh grade years. It includes Mark Hamill's fan mail address (even though I never sent him a letter), a "recipe" for cooking a butter clam in a larger cockle shell over a tiny fire on the beach, and brief day-by-day journalings about being at Girl Scount sailing camp. All in all, it's a very slim but still significant relic.
I was twelve and a half that summer, and for decades I have identified it as the time when I started to become my own self rather than primarily the product of my family. It was an initiatory summer.
My first experience with keeping a diary was an assignment in -- if I remember correctly -- my sixth grade English class. Those pages, with construction paper covers, are probably in the bin as well, but since that was an assignment, not something I chose to do, I consider this pocket-sized yellow notebook my first truly personal journal writing. I had written stories before -- and one of the key aspects of that summer was starting to write what I would one day call my "Journeys" saga -- but as far as I can remember I hadn't kept a diary before.
The second notebook I looked at is also a spiral bound Mead notebook, but that one is 9.5x6, with December 4, 1982 neatly written above the first entry: winter of my senior year of high school. The first words are It's hard to know where to begin this, my seventh notebook. At the risk of sounding ridiculous when to myself when I come back and read this in future times, the facts are these. . .
Dear 17 year-old self: Thank you. That was actually very helpful.
I read the first few pages of the green notebook, and even though I would not have been able to summon the memories independently, the words felt like they were dropping into grooves in my brain: memories not just of the experiences and feelings, but of writing them down and re-reading them later. Those first few pages contain a lot of emotion about my current and past boyfriends (who are still two of my very best friends) and the beginning of an account of a trip to a debate tournament that all three of us participated in.
The prospect of reading all the journals -- and there are a lot of them -- is kind of daunting, but it feels important to go back and remember who I used to be and how I got here. I want to go back and re-witness my own becoming, remember people and events which were once crucially important and which I have forgotten in the decades since. I want to honor my past as I feel poised to move forward into a new chapter of my adult life. I'm 54 now, and since my incredible healing experiences at the turn of this year I feel like I'm finally starting to become the person I've always wanted to be.
(So yes,blackstone_hermitage, I guess I do feel like a late bloomer.)
Rather to my surprise, what I believe is my first journal was near the top. . .
Yes, it's titled "My Fair Notebook." I had a tendency toward the dramatic from a very young age.
I didn't write the year anywhere in it, and only a couple of items are actual journal entries with any dates at all. When young, every year is so unique and vivid that writing down the number seems superfluous. But since the first entry is about winning the citizenship award at the end of sixth grade and there's a mention of Star Wars in it, it actually is fairly easy to determine that it was written in the summer of 1977, between my sixth and seventh grade years. It includes Mark Hamill's fan mail address (even though I never sent him a letter), a "recipe" for cooking a butter clam in a larger cockle shell over a tiny fire on the beach, and brief day-by-day journalings about being at Girl Scount sailing camp. All in all, it's a very slim but still significant relic.
I was twelve and a half that summer, and for decades I have identified it as the time when I started to become my own self rather than primarily the product of my family. It was an initiatory summer.
My first experience with keeping a diary was an assignment in -- if I remember correctly -- my sixth grade English class. Those pages, with construction paper covers, are probably in the bin as well, but since that was an assignment, not something I chose to do, I consider this pocket-sized yellow notebook my first truly personal journal writing. I had written stories before -- and one of the key aspects of that summer was starting to write what I would one day call my "Journeys" saga -- but as far as I can remember I hadn't kept a diary before.
The second notebook I looked at is also a spiral bound Mead notebook, but that one is 9.5x6, with December 4, 1982 neatly written above the first entry: winter of my senior year of high school. The first words are It's hard to know where to begin this, my seventh notebook. At the risk of sounding ridiculous when to myself when I come back and read this in future times, the facts are these. . .
Dear 17 year-old self: Thank you. That was actually very helpful.
I read the first few pages of the green notebook, and even though I would not have been able to summon the memories independently, the words felt like they were dropping into grooves in my brain: memories not just of the experiences and feelings, but of writing them down and re-reading them later. Those first few pages contain a lot of emotion about my current and past boyfriends (who are still two of my very best friends) and the beginning of an account of a trip to a debate tournament that all three of us participated in.
The prospect of reading all the journals -- and there are a lot of them -- is kind of daunting, but it feels important to go back and remember who I used to be and how I got here. I want to go back and re-witness my own becoming, remember people and events which were once crucially important and which I have forgotten in the decades since. I want to honor my past as I feel poised to move forward into a new chapter of my adult life. I'm 54 now, and since my incredible healing experiences at the turn of this year I feel like I'm finally starting to become the person I've always wanted to be.
(So yes,
blackstone_hermitage, I guess I do feel like a late bloomer.)
