The passage of time is an interesting thing. Nothing quite shows you how you’ve changed, and gives a glimpse of the person you used to be – and by contrast the person you’ve become – like reading an old journal. As the last several years have passed, I have let slip the habit of daily, or even monthly, journal writing, relying more and more heavily upon social media transcripts and copies of text messages between myself and my husband to record the events of my life.
But as any good author knows, a story that just recounts events is hardly a story at all. It is the emotions of the characters, and what happens within them, that gives the story a soul. And perhaps that it what I have lost somewhere along the years as I’ve fallen into simply recording and recounting snippets of events. The years, and the daily cares, and the beloved children wash away your soul if you let it.
As P!nk says in one of her songs “Time is life’s great healer, it’s a bandit in disguise; stealing all your memories as each year passes by. It’s the same old story just told on a different day, another lonesome journey down a dark hallway.” Don’t allow your days to become a string of events.
-Thoughts From Long Ago (An unedited journal entry of a SAHM and writer)-
Sometimes I really hate “catch-up” [journal] entries. Sometimes what I really just want to do is talk, but whom do I have to talk to? There is no poetry in my spoken words. There is nothing in them of me. So much of me is found in my writing, my thoughts on paper, but how often do I touch pen to paper & just pour out my soul? Not for years. There is a kind of relief to writing, a truth to it. Even my penmanship changes when I write my thoughts, so much more of me than just the common recitation of events. I wish … and yet I don’t. Writing is so personal to me, but to whom do I write? Writing is so foreign anymore that my well of words, of my very dreams, quickly runs dry. But the fruit of the well is not stale, not to me at least. To me it is sweet. Bitter-sweet. For I am lonely. With whom do I have to share this bit of sweetness, that begs to fill my lonely heart? I give it all to others and none there is who likes, or even cares for it. I give all of myself, & the gift is thrown to the ground. Worthless, unwanted, unappreciated. I try to share my thoughts, my dreams, myself, but “though you’re still with me, I’ve been alone all along.” [Evanescence – My Immortal] The words & images & feelings & thoughts flow from my hand as quick as I can think them, slipping through the cracks like sand. A gritty annoyance that has no place beyond my mind, beyond my pages. To them it is naught but grit and sand. But to me it is stardust.