If I had a real time piece, (not the digital-battery-operated-full-frontal-modern clocks one finds in Asda, Tesco, or Home Bagains but one of those loud grand Victorian pieces of magnificent engineering), I believe that time would seem so much more vocal with its tick-tick-tocking reminding me of all the duties, responsibilities, actions and targets that need to be jam packed into each and every second of the day. It would also highlight all the things I only wish that I had more time to devote to like getting back into my writing space and work on my novel. Instead, I steal away to meander aimlessly from one cerebral adventure to the next in my personal journal. I am beginning to believe that the journal should be the novel rather than the one I am working on. It has it all: Romance, myth, legend, fully developed characters, intrigue, strange turns of events that leads one to believe that the machinations of the divine are truely evident...
As a child, I had the understanding that the diary was supposed to be a record of one's musings, feelings, thoughts and ideas that one would never dream of showing to anyone. The journal was a place to keep your secrets so that you would not be tempted to tell anyone else and by doing so, not give in to gossiping...which is a sin. I remember my first ever journal. It was light blue with white polka dots and a little picture of a girl in a garden watering flowers in the middle of the cover. There was a lock on it and I kept the key in my jewelry box. I would have been eleven or twelve and most of the time I wrote fantastical observations of the adults in my life. As the journal went on, the entries evolved and there were outpourings of how J. was cute but T. seemed nicer to girls and would probably make a better husband. There was lamenting that I was not as pretty as R. and how I wished JM noticed me. And then that day that I kissed JM behind a door but he went off and asked T to the dance and I was devastated. I remember I finished each entry with a question. I rarely found the answers to the questions or if I did, I never wrote them down. Later, the journals became a blackhole of the most nefarious feelings and outpouring of agony. The very exercise of writing in it became a chore because it meant that I had to face the unfortunate fact that so many times in our lives there were only questions and no answers. And since the journals then were a record of those times, the information that I purged myself from was all very sad and very bleak.
One day, the cause of my sadness found my journals and read them. He looked at me like I was some kind of Jekell and Hyde. I saw how dangerous it was to expose personal pain. In the end, I guess he deserved what he got. His snooping brought him face to face with himself in another persons eyes and the realisation was not pretty. The following day I threw all of my journals on the fire. I suppose it was more of a symbolic act rather than "getting rid of the evidence." I was made to feel wrong for writing down all my personal feelings. I realised that there was too much raw energy in the exercise. What I had hoped to record was an enlightening stream of awareness but the writing was more like so much literary waste rather than the nurturing of ideas. It was not until many years later that I realised where I went wrong. Too much floundering within a sea of questions and no effort to begin to look for the answers. In other words, I was only dumping and not cleaning the mess up.
I only recently I began to write in a personal journal again and it has become a love affair. The journal has become more than just a record of personal feelings or recording of events and observations. It has become for me the living and breathing helpmate to achieving a personal awareness. Each entry has a beginning, climax and resolution. Each entry serves as a true and accurate map from a starting point to a destination. Good or bad, the communion with ones own ideas can be a very rewarding experience.
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