Journal
I journal now.
I have attempted this for going on decades now. In various forms, under different descriptions, and for uncountable reasons why, I have tried to spend a little time with a notebook and a pen, and tell the invisible just how I was feeling.
And failed.
Every time.
Until now.
I don’t succeed every day. Just like, with life, I don’t succeed every day. But now, I try. I am doing this on the advice of a friend. Not a close friend, because the advice of close friends, for me, has a way of becoming a message that falls on deaf ears. Deaf ears that don’t read lips all that well, so the well-meaning of others, just as often, falls. So, where were we? Oh yeah, forms, descriptions, and reasons.
Forms: affirmations, observations, gratitude, grief, self-talk, listening, healing, prayer… just to name a few more than a few.
Descriptions: meditative, stream of consciousness, automatic writing, biographical, dear fucking diary, poetry and prose. If I left something out, I’m sorry. If it meant more, I’m sure I’d still remember it.
Reasons: to get in touch with my feelings, to separate myself from my feelings, to find my true path, to stay off the wrong path, to find myself, to lose myself, to know myself, to find God, to know God, to have God know me.
Yeah, I used to journal to God. But a long time ago I stopped wanting God to hear what I had to say. So I stopped journaling to God.
I journal now.
When I used to journal, the many MANY times I tried to journal, I couldn’t write freely, always editing the thoughts in my mind before the words scratched themselves into the page. I’ve always been a stickler for the way words feel as they lay on your tongue, as you silently read them to yourself, like a whisper with no breath to carry the sound.
C’mon, admit it with me, we ALL do that. It’s the real reason why people move their lips when they read. Some people just hide it better, or care much more, than others. You don’t want to be thought of as simple minded, so you keep your lips pressed together when you read, but your tongue still moves between your teeth and the roof of your mouth, because we ALL love how words FEEL in our mouths.
Anyway, in those days, the words had to read perfect to feel perfect. So I quit, because the prose ended up being prosaic, and prosaic is just another way of saying “droning self-importance”, and the whole point of journaling was to get past self-importance and discover something more than self, right?
But, bright side, I did become a bloody awful poet, so there’s that.
I journal now.
I don’t know what I will discover, this time. Will it end up being just another one-man circle jerk of overly-edited thoughts? So far, no. I have an actual editor for that now. One thing I know, so far, is that, where the words used to come out like sawdust, now they come out like blood. No cuts required. I even doodle now. Also in blood.
The world is a different place than it was the last time I tried this, just as my place in it is different. Recently, my walls came down with a crash, and instead of trying to rebuild walls, I think it’s better if I just write what I find in the rubble and move on.
And no, you will never read my journal. No one will. Except maybe God, and then, mostly over my shoulder.
Besides, some of it might be about you.
© Copyright 2017 William S. Friday
