My History of Writing

This lino-cut print by Guy Ottewell is a good representation of how I feel when I write--sort of half-naked, exposing myself, like a little girl widening her eyes enough to get down to the flesh and bones of how she really perceives what's going on around her, and within her.


Here is a brief history of my obsession with writing:

When I was thirteen, at the beginning my freshman year of high school, I decided to keep a journal of my thoughts—not just what I was doing, but what I really thought about things. There is a distinct difference in my mind between the journal and the diary, and I believed that. The founding fathers wrote journals, not diaries. Anne Frank wrote a diary—a beautiful record of her doings, but she was also an excellent journalist in that she took the time to expound on her ideas and philosophies in relation to the events of the day, and that’s what I wanted to do. Expound, and create the philosophy of my own life.

One of the twists in this plot, to me, was that my sister was the one who I thought was (and I think she still is) the most brilliant writer. She used to write so much all the time, and then, one day, she just decided that wasn't what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a vet, and then a psychologist, and then a photographer, and she's settled there for now. I was like, what? How can you stop writing because you're so, so good at it? Maybe it was around that time that I decided, maybe subconsciously, that if she wasn't going to pursue writing, then I would.

I carried a notebook with me constantly. I wrote during class and at home and during orchestra rehearsals in the evening and during lunch. In high school, my dad even grounded me from my notebook (this also happened to Harriet the Spy, a kindred spirit) for a week because I stayed up too late writing, but the groundation wasn’t entirely effective because I just wrote on pieces of paper and stuck them in when he gave it back.

This behavior kept up over the years where I would rather write to myself than talk to anyone else. I remember, senior year, writing 30 pages in one sitting about one weekend because I had a crush on a boy at the orchestra festival in Boulder. He looked like Harry Potter. I only saw him twice in my life and we didn’t even talk very much, and somehow I had more words to say about him than I had ever spoken with him. So pictures are worth a thousand words, I guess.

Now, I have more than 50 “volumes” in boxes, which equates to about 10,000 pages all about my relatively mundane life—although, to me, my life isn’t mundane at all. I feel like I’ve lived 10 people’s lives already with so many characters and travels and adventures. I feel like the celebrity of my own life, and, in ways, I hope that everyone feels that way, that everyone feels they have a story worth living, perhaps even worth taking notes on now and then.

There’s a lot of good and lot of ill in these notebooks, and for a few years I couldn’t bring myself to pull them out and read them because they would take me to strange places, annals in my mind that were too familiar and meant to be avoided. It’s the vortex experience, if you’ve read that one Joan Didian book about death. Not that I’ve died, but some memories just feel like death because I don’t live in the past anymore. The past is like these grainy, intangible light particles that don’t make for a substantial meal of any sort. Like oxygen bars. Oxygen ice cream bars. So not fulfilling. Just like living in the past.

I used to think, well, what will I do with all these journals—what is the point, no one will ever read them in their entirety. I feel sorry for anyone who would. So what is the point, really?

Today’s thoughts have revolved around the purpose of self-discovery, and the value in taking time to figure yourself out. While these thousands of pages may mean nothing to anyone, including me sometimes, they were and are the tools that give me insight into the realm of my own understanding. Now I know the way my brain works, and as my brain changes, I keep figuring it out—it’s a constant process. By practicing the exercise of brain-juice extraction, I have better learned to understand the workings of my own mind to the point that I can apply my mind with greater facility—at least to the activities I care about.

This does not apply to Saturday mornings spent asleep until noon with only thoughts of orange rolls and the previous night’s dreams.

I remember thinking in my teens, will this ever stop? Will I ever stop spending so many hours of every week with a pen in hand? I told myself, maybe whenever I get married, I’ll stop writing, because see, I had this honesty policy. I refused to write anything but the truth, which means that the notebooks do contain swear words, and frightening encounters, and faults, and really good honest things too, but it is the one venue where I allow myself to be perfectly honest.

And so, really, I thought back then that maybe I would stop writing so much when I got married because then I’d have to write about sex, and maybe that’s not appropriate for future generations.

But, that too is a part of life. I’ll spare the details. But truth is, I haven’t been writing as much since we’ve been married—lots of adjustments, lots of reorganizing our lives with couple habits instead of single-person habits.

However . . . I’m getting back into it.

The point of this entry was to declare that I was void of original thought and was planning to put up experts from a recent journal: J38, June 16–July 24, 2007. That’s how they’re all labeled. J_ with the dates. Journal 38.

This particular journal I specifically christened to mark a turning point in my self-discovery, and it turned out to be just that—so intentions do make a difference, I guess. I covered it with vintage-print Halloween paper that says, “Friendly Fairy, Witch, or Fay, Fulfil the Wish You wish to day.” Just like that. And on the inside cover, I wrote

Everything changes on Halloween

Above a postcard of a Renoir painting. Renoir is one of my favorites.

Experts from My Journals

Summer, 2007

To be continued . . .