I’ve kept a journal since the fourth grade. I think it was originally Laura Ingalls Wilder who inspired me. I pictured her spending her evenings writing in a diary all about Pa, Ma and her sisters. Of course, I was never one to record the events of my life though in some way I wanted to be. I think I was born with a sense of impending doom for the world and thought someone should record in the first person what the world was like, and I would try at times, but eventually the entries would turn into what would become years of emotional discussion with myself.
My journals were more of a collection of my reactions to events, broken up by long debates with myself about where in life I was headed. Even as a nine year old the entries were a string of unanswerable questions about the world, me and the people in my life. Would I ever be happy? Were my parents happy? What was my cat thinking? Would I always feel this lonely? Why can’t my friends leave me in peace?
When I look back on these records of my life it appears that I have been through so much emotionally, up and down. Crying one day (oh he doesn’t love me, the cat died, I was fired, I fought with my mother…), excited the next (oh today he loves me, I have a new job, this next story will be the ONE that gets published, ooooh ice cream…) and then a long period of nothing. Weeks or months may pass between entries, when life just simply went on.
Maybe I should write a disclaimer to paste into the front of all of those diaries, just in case one day someone does read them:
“What you are about to read is the emotional story of Jane. Please note that while her life may appear to vacillate between deep woe and high adventure, in between those events…nothing much really happened. So take heart dear reader, and trust that in the end she turned out okay.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pretty much what happened.
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