Friday, March 2, 2012

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...

'on Joan Didion...
'
One of the essays I enjoyed was "On Keeping A Notebook." At some point or another I believe we have all kept some type of journal/notebook. Whether, it was mentally or physically. I have a rubber-maid tub filled with journals/notebooks, dating back since the early 90's (haha kind of funny, the early 90's). Now do I ever go back to read them over? No. Yet, maybe one day I can look back and piece together the parts of my life that I still wonder about. My writing has gotten a lot more descriptive and the spelling has gotten a lot better and I think that Didion was right when she suggested that keeping notebooks are a way to keep in touch. You can travel through your life again, not in a reliving the past type of thing, but a remembrance of events that happened in your life that can explain yourself, from your "old self's" point of view.
I remember the way I used to write, I would give every little detail, for instance, "I woke up at 7:09AM and washed up at 7:13AM. I went to the kitchen to see what there was to eat. I ate cereal at 7:24AM..etc." It seemed that I was more interested in the timing of things. As the years moved along, I developed other creative ways to keeping journals/notebooks. I didn't like the term "diary" because I felt it was too girly. I thought the term "journal" was more sophisticated. Journal or notebook for that matter, sound more like something a "writer" would have.
I was a young writer, still am. I often wondered about what people would think of my notebooks if they ever found them. Would they make sense? Would they like what they read? If I read them over now, would I be happy or would it bring up something in the past that I already forgot, if I forgot something important, does that make me a bad person? I wonder how much of a reconnection of the past can I handle. Didion says, that keeping journals is to remember what it is to be me: that is always the point. Maybe, it is. Someone else reading my notebook, would have no real connection to it. What I write is for me and only me, unless I edit it for an audience. The only audience that I want for my journals, is me, for now. For now, I want to reconnect with my old self's that I have hidden in that rubber-maid tub, which, sits on a dusty closet shelf.

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