Diary
I visited our campus bookstore this morning to get some additional school supplies for my daughter. And of course, since I was in a bookstore, I just had to window-shop. What captured my attention were these beautiful journals. I was always a diary-writer since I was 12 or 13. I don't know where my old diaries are now, most probably rotting somewhere or being eaten by bookworms. But they existed at one time. As soon as I saw the journals, my hands started itching again, wanting to write.
I didn't get one though. I still have a journal at home that has too many blank pages on it. I stopped being so prolific about writing when my daughter was born. I try to write in it once in a while, but the entries are few and far in between. And my hands that used to be able to copy an entire school notebook in one night (when I was copying someone else's notebook at school, with their permission of course, since we needed to submit our notebooks at the end of the school term in HS), is now barely able to write a few paragraphs before they start aching. So I hit this wall where my thoughts are too fast for my hands, to the point that sometimes I'll forget what I wanted to put down in the first place after my hands finished writing my previous train of thought.
I type faster than I write now. Plus, I love the feel of a keyboard underneath my fingers and wrists. It's the same feeling I get when I hold a pen in my hand and stare at a blank page. I don't care what I put down, as long as I fill the void, as long as my fingers do something, either writing or typing. And so, like now, I just start typing inane thoughts in my head.
Journal writing for me is like a pensieve. I've never had photographic memory like some lucky chaps out there. I've always needed to write something down to remember it. And if there are thoughts, experiences, feelings that I want to hold on to and never forget, my journal is there to collect them and keep them for me. Most of my old diary entries are full of the adolescent yearnings of a girl who was too secluded and protected from the world. They're quite embarrassing to read, really. But I've reached a point in my life where I finally have no regrets, well, I have no regrets except for two specific things. And so, when I read them, it takes me back to those days, when the possibilities were endless and the world was full of excitement. And whatever embarrassing things were documented there, they are a part of me and the journey I had to make to get where I am, whatever that is.
I didn't get one though. I still have a journal at home that has too many blank pages on it. I stopped being so prolific about writing when my daughter was born. I try to write in it once in a while, but the entries are few and far in between. And my hands that used to be able to copy an entire school notebook in one night (when I was copying someone else's notebook at school, with their permission of course, since we needed to submit our notebooks at the end of the school term in HS), is now barely able to write a few paragraphs before they start aching. So I hit this wall where my thoughts are too fast for my hands, to the point that sometimes I'll forget what I wanted to put down in the first place after my hands finished writing my previous train of thought.
I type faster than I write now. Plus, I love the feel of a keyboard underneath my fingers and wrists. It's the same feeling I get when I hold a pen in my hand and stare at a blank page. I don't care what I put down, as long as I fill the void, as long as my fingers do something, either writing or typing. And so, like now, I just start typing inane thoughts in my head.
Journal writing for me is like a pensieve. I've never had photographic memory like some lucky chaps out there. I've always needed to write something down to remember it. And if there are thoughts, experiences, feelings that I want to hold on to and never forget, my journal is there to collect them and keep them for me. Most of my old diary entries are full of the adolescent yearnings of a girl who was too secluded and protected from the world. They're quite embarrassing to read, really. But I've reached a point in my life where I finally have no regrets, well, I have no regrets except for two specific things. And so, when I read them, it takes me back to those days, when the possibilities were endless and the world was full of excitement. And whatever embarrassing things were documented there, they are a part of me and the journey I had to make to get where I am, whatever that is.