The Power of Journaling: Me + 20 years

Whenever I'm walking, and that's often lately, I compose blogs in my head.  I know exactly what I want to write and almost exactly how I want to write it.  But when I get home, I don't sit down quickly enough to do it and then, somehow, I just never do.  I get distracted. Log into work. Flip on the TV or sit down to pay my bills.  We all know how that happens.

I was just talking with my friend Sara about this tonight. Being of about the same age, we have memories, both mental and physical, of the years we kept journals or diaries or "blogs on paper" - whatever you want to call them.  The same age is important in that when we did it, it was before the age of the internet and the 140 character limit or the quick Facebook mind dump where we actually took pen to paper and really WROTE. I absolutely adore that I have those old journals now: so much that I should just pick up one and do it again. But I never do. And I get angry with myself that I don't.

For years as I moved from apartment to apartment, those journals lived with most of my other belongings in a storage unit.  It wasn't until I moved to my place now, when I got to dump that unit and have all my personal things around me again, did I rediscover them. And I realized that I hadn't opened a single one of them for 20 years.

Imagine my glee then, when I decided to sit down and page through them just a bit ago:  written journals from years gone by. I recognize my own handwriting, of course: that actually hasn't changed much (that fact amuses me a bit, actually).  And I recognize the young woman who wrote them....sort of.  I can see myself in her, but then, also not. I can read of her joy and her pain and her confusion, her fun with friends, her confusion over family, her heartache over early lost loves; but it's hard to believe that was me in a way.  I don't feel the emotions that young (er) woman did then.  I often want to shake her and say: what are you thinking, girl? Or: it gets so much better than that. You deserve more than that! Or: yeah. That's your first of a line of heartbreaks, honey.  Some will be easier; some will be worse.  I want to tell her she has no clue what she's talking about most of the time.  Or: ohhh just wait, child. Your life is going to go places you haven't even dreamed about yet.  But, obviously, I can't tell HER anything, so I just kept reading.

And then I opened up to this entry; dated January 24, 1993:

"Wow. This is kind of strange. Knowing that someone will someday be reading these entries. Maybe not so strange as much as awkward...or unusual.  I do have an audience in mind when I write, which I guess is weird for a personal journal. Usually I guess it's just myself + 20 years."

Myself + 20 years. 1993 was just that! How did this girl -- this me -- who was so naive and young and green -- somehow come right out and write something that was so dead on true like that?  Trust me: it gave me chills. I checked the calendar quite a few times before I let it register the truth on me that yep: she wrote that 20 years ago and I read it for the first time since she/I did, exactly 20 years later. 

I mean, honestly? How cool is that?

I actually really don't want to go back and tell that old young me those things I mentioned earlier.  That girl would never have understood them (and what 20-year-old listens to a 40-something anyway?). And I certainly don't want to go back and BE her again.  But what I do want  is to recapture that spirit and joy she/I had in just picking up a pen and putting words on paper -- however mundane they may seem at the time -- because it IS apparent now that they really can mean something later. Somehow she knew that then and I forgot it along the way when she and I decided to stop keeping journals.  Huh. Imagine that.  Sometimes you really CAN learn from the younger generation.

And how crazy more to learn from "the younger generation" that was actually your own self.

Going to start doing this again.  It's past time to start this again. :)  And, almost serendipitously, I just realized I actually have a completely blank paper journal among the full ones on my shelf.  (It apparently lived, saddened, amongst its full brethren in that storage unit, too.)  And the very first entry will naturally have to be how I hope I'm lucky enough to have an audience in mind as I write.

Me plus another 20 years.


*journals pictured actual journals  :)  The asparagus one is the blank one. Why a journal with *asparagus* on it appealed to me in the day is beyond me.  But she must have known something; it makes me grin now.