History of Journals

A History of Journals

1. I started my first journal at eight. It was eight that I was introduced to free write in class. I loved writing about my cousins and our adventures at the family farm but I realized I had way more to say than what I could churn out in twenty minutes.Plus I realized there was stuff in there I didn’t want to broadcast to the class. So with much anticipation, I opened a blank composition notebook and wrote exactly five sentences then put it away.

            For the first page I accompanied the writing with cutesy illustrations, as though it was an                       imitation of someone else’s notebook. Yeah, that was over by the second page. I kept my first diary loosy goosy. Usually I waxed poetic about Danny Campbell, one of the few blondes I have ever been attracted to. Sometimes I glued newspaper clippings into the journal and commented on them as best I could. I think eight year old me was a communist. 

There was another component to my diary: my hatred of my gym teacher. Personally looking back I’m not sure what was going on there since he was always nice to me. He was nice to all the kids. He was the “cool teacher” and he made up games like “Toilet Tag” for us to play. I had this notion he was “in love with me”. This fear was very real and caused me to get sick on gym days. The nurse was so sick of me, I could literally see her face fall everytime I shuffled into her office. No one ever figured it out. It was the first but not the last time my journal would be called upon to hold secrets. Nor would be the test one to be violated.

2. My fourth grade diary was obsessed with my growing body. It was 75% puberty  and 25% this mean girl Megan who become my best friend. And some reason I wrote the whole thing in permanent marker. Maybe I figured it would make it more difficult for snoops to read. I was right but it also made it more difficult for myself to read. It’s like damn hieroglyphics. 

Along the way I made Love/Hate lists. I loved making them eccentric, leaving down words without any explanation. Some things that were featured on the Love list: thick permanent markers, cinnquains (I was an educated child) and clocks. On the Hate list? Cheese (I outgrrew), black pants (no explanation) and being fat (note: I was not fat. I was ten. I was getting hips and breasts for the first time). 

I also recorded my dreams. Most of my dreams were actually predicting future sexual turn ons that confused me desperately as a ten year old. I knew though that these were wrong, not to be shared at the breakfast table. And I was ashamed. But also excited. This meant something.Oh how right I was.

3. My middle school journal spanned three musicals (Oliver, Anything Goes and Guys and Dolls), two crushes, two cliques, two best friends, two mental illnesses (OCD and GAD) and one dead grandmother (it sounds casual on paper but I remember it kind of felt like someone had removed my lungs without anesetic). There was some good things, like when my parents brought home two cats (Susie and Scout) as a surprise for us. I remembered writing in my looping scrawl “Guess what! Guess what!” (I always instructed my journals to guess even though I knew, of course, they could not) It was probably the most exciting thing that happened in my life so far. Still one of them. 

If I had written in pencil in my first journal, permanent markers in  my second, I wrote in literally anything I could find (usually in regular ballpoint pens). Like my writing was so desperate that I could not wait a moment more, I most expel the words now, now, now. And then some things I didn’t even write about. For example I devoted one line to my lifechanging diagnosis of OCD. It was literally “I have OCD and GAD. I see a therapist” (it was actually a psychiatrist (“but I don’t want to talk about it”). It was the only secret I kept from Megan.

I let Megan read my diary when she came over. I let her draw on the cover and the back. She got a kick out of the fact that we both mortally hated the same teacher who operated on public humiliation. She even read what I had wrote about my body and we whispered about it during sleepovers. Together we got brave and weighed ourselves. I was heavier, my curves more developed. Eventually I started writing about Megan. When I knew she would no longer read it,

4. It was the fall of my eighth grade year and so many things were changing. I had to make what I deemed “grown up” decisions several times a day. Who would I sit with at lunch? The older kids who seemed happy to include me or my classmates who made me feel like an outsider? What would I wear? Something that would help me blend in or something sure to grab attention? Would I lie to my parents today? Would I lie to myself today? 

I came home every day and sat on the bench in the front lawn outside my house and I tried to record every painstaking day. Every person who called me a dyke. Every person who called me a slut. Every person who said I was psycho. I tried to be strong. That time at the bench was where I fortified myself, like a charging port for a phone. The actual notebook was a lime green composition notebook that came detached from the covers. I got so crazed about utilizing all the space so I wrote in the margins, something I would do from then on.

It took me six composition notebooks to get me through eighth grade. A lot happened. For better or for worse. Mostly for worse but I doubt I’d be the person I am today if it hadn’t happened I started decorating the insides of journals with what I called “snips”. Initially they were just clips from magazines but then I started hunting for them on the internet, printing them out en masse and putting them in baggies. It wasted a lot of ink and paper but it was cheaper than crack.

5. I stopped journaling briefly at the end of my freshmen year of high school and resumed in the summer where I was working briefly with a musical theater group and teaching kids at a Vacation  BIble School with my youth group. I also was sneaking around with this college drug dealer I had met in eigth grade. He didn’t treat me well and I was fine with that. I should not have put down my crimes in writing. But I always felt like not telling my journal about something was akin to cheating on it.

As you might have guessed my parents read my diary and not only were they furious at my sexual activities, there was another entry where I got drunk at a party and persuaded a guy to feel me up. He asked me my name. I told him it didn’t matter. Probably should have left that part out of the diary but I didn’t like leaving stuff off. It felt wrong. “Do we have to worry about you being pregnant?” My dad said not looking at me. I think that was the most shameful moment of my whole life. But I had been very careful (thank God. I knew enough that Jo was not the one I wanted to get pregnant with). I was grounded from then to eternity or rather when Hurricane Sandy hit and everybody forgot.

I stil wrote in my diary, but if I wanted to conceal something (my drinking for example) I’d write oin the back of one of my snips then tape it to the the inside cover. Those came in handle for when I lost my virginity or tried pot .I could write a whole diary all its own based on these snips. Yes, later I still take a different. Many have come and gone and they sit safe in a fireproof journal (or four) in my closet.