Oct 3, 2023·edited Oct 3, 2023Liked by Anne Boyd Rioux
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about journaling.
When I was immigrating to the United States from Canada to marry my American husband, I gave away most everything and stored a few things at my parent's house, but a year later, I came back to take stock, and I released the rest of it, taking only a white sofa, which I eventually gave away, too. It is freeing, in a way, and in another, it registered in my bones as deep loss. Personal loss. Loss of a life I had built the way I wanted, even though I was moving away to build a new wonderful life with another.
At one point, about two years into my marriage, I realized that focusing on what I had given up would not be healthy long term, and instead, I needed to shift toward who I was becoming in relationship outside myself. That felt right and positive and strong.
Now, 25 years married, I'm at the point of wanting to release everything we have and starting completely fresh. New town, new house, new belongings, new job. My retired husband is almost at the same point, but he'd rather have teeth pulled than move again. I tend to embrace change and he tends to hold onto the familiar. I like the familiar, too, but I'm SO drawn to starting over, and with a lot less stuff.
I, too, have been avoiding journaling because I don't want to complain or bemoan or fret or brag or rejoice on paper. I like the idea of journaling, but it seems like a lot of effort to create a tangible record rather than throwing it all on a white table in my head, moving the "puzzle pieces" around, and organizing them until they make sense. Putting personal words on paper seems to me to have too much energy, too much importance. It feels too much like holding on rather than letting go, which might seem like a contradictory statement. Ha! You can see that I have complex and unruly thoughts and feelings about this that I haven't yet sorted through. Writing fiction is WAY easier so I channel feelings and complications and joy into made-up stories. Fiction for me is about sharing rather than recording, which is what journaling feels like, but maybe I need a different perspective on it.
Thanks for sharing this--and the sense of watching things that we think we attach meaning to become just objects again with their own histories, taking it with them. And the journaling has made me think more about the freedom it can provide--but how that freedom is hard to reach sometimes, hard to get down on paper in a way that feels authentic. It's inspired me to begin again, to think of it as a tool towards greater clarity and nothing more. I love that.
Anne, thank you for reminding us that stuff is temporary and can be taken away in a minute or a few days/weeks/months in a water-logged city. Then what's left? Does it matter that we replace it? You write that so poignantly. What is it that endures beyond the stuff? Who are we without it? I always return to the significance of Man's Search for Meaning. What baggage does our stuff symbolize?
I do keep a journal. Of sorts. Many days it's just what I did that day with an occasional kernel of something more. But I persist. It's the only regular time I write in cursive. There's something real about that. I use a regular At-A-Glance appointment book. The space for each day is tiny. I write in a tiny hand, very different than my usual sweeping one. I doubt that anyone finding it later would even bother to try to decipher the sentences. I don't try either. The most valuable record might be the books I have read and my response to them. Those I can find.
Occasionally, I don't write, but I try to be faithful to the process. I've just returned from Germany and brought two slim books to write in. I wrote only one day. After a week home, I think I'll just write across the days in this book, the pleasures and struggles of traveling at 88 and what I might have learned about myself and my ancestral German people.
Reflection never stops, does it? If I'm not learning, I'm not living.
Enough for now. I don't know if any of this makes sense.
My own journal writing has been pretty sporadic. It has never been something that I've done on a daily basis, but I've had periods throughout my life (since I was a kid) of keeping a journal. Now that I'm starting to do more personal and creative writing, I'm finding that those journals are so helpful for bringing to life past selves and past lives. It has been both enjoyable and painful at times to revisit them.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about journaling.
When I was immigrating to the United States from Canada to marry my American husband, I gave away most everything and stored a few things at my parent's house, but a year later, I came back to take stock, and I released the rest of it, taking only a white sofa, which I eventually gave away, too. It is freeing, in a way, and in another, it registered in my bones as deep loss. Personal loss. Loss of a life I had built the way I wanted, even though I was moving away to build a new wonderful life with another.
At one point, about two years into my marriage, I realized that focusing on what I had given up would not be healthy long term, and instead, I needed to shift toward who I was becoming in relationship outside myself. That felt right and positive and strong.
Now, 25 years married, I'm at the point of wanting to release everything we have and starting completely fresh. New town, new house, new belongings, new job. My retired husband is almost at the same point, but he'd rather have teeth pulled than move again. I tend to embrace change and he tends to hold onto the familiar. I like the familiar, too, but I'm SO drawn to starting over, and with a lot less stuff.
I, too, have been avoiding journaling because I don't want to complain or bemoan or fret or brag or rejoice on paper. I like the idea of journaling, but it seems like a lot of effort to create a tangible record rather than throwing it all on a white table in my head, moving the "puzzle pieces" around, and organizing them until they make sense. Putting personal words on paper seems to me to have too much energy, too much importance. It feels too much like holding on rather than letting go, which might seem like a contradictory statement. Ha! You can see that I have complex and unruly thoughts and feelings about this that I haven't yet sorted through. Writing fiction is WAY easier so I channel feelings and complications and joy into made-up stories. Fiction for me is about sharing rather than recording, which is what journaling feels like, but maybe I need a different perspective on it.
Thanks for sharing this--and the sense of watching things that we think we attach meaning to become just objects again with their own histories, taking it with them. And the journaling has made me think more about the freedom it can provide--but how that freedom is hard to reach sometimes, hard to get down on paper in a way that feels authentic. It's inspired me to begin again, to think of it as a tool towards greater clarity and nothing more. I love that.
Anne, thank you for reminding us that stuff is temporary and can be taken away in a minute or a few days/weeks/months in a water-logged city. Then what's left? Does it matter that we replace it? You write that so poignantly. What is it that endures beyond the stuff? Who are we without it? I always return to the significance of Man's Search for Meaning. What baggage does our stuff symbolize?
I do keep a journal. Of sorts. Many days it's just what I did that day with an occasional kernel of something more. But I persist. It's the only regular time I write in cursive. There's something real about that. I use a regular At-A-Glance appointment book. The space for each day is tiny. I write in a tiny hand, very different than my usual sweeping one. I doubt that anyone finding it later would even bother to try to decipher the sentences. I don't try either. The most valuable record might be the books I have read and my response to them. Those I can find.
Occasionally, I don't write, but I try to be faithful to the process. I've just returned from Germany and brought two slim books to write in. I wrote only one day. After a week home, I think I'll just write across the days in this book, the pleasures and struggles of traveling at 88 and what I might have learned about myself and my ancestral German people.
Reflection never stops, does it? If I'm not learning, I'm not living.
Enough for now. I don't know if any of this makes sense.
My own journal writing has been pretty sporadic. It has never been something that I've done on a daily basis, but I've had periods throughout my life (since I was a kid) of keeping a journal. Now that I'm starting to do more personal and creative writing, I'm finding that those journals are so helpful for bringing to life past selves and past lives. It has been both enjoyable and painful at times to revisit them.