I’ve had a few journals over the course of my life. Perhaps a good dozen. I was even one of these girls who had a diary with a lock at one point.
It’s the kind of thing you get for Christmas and have to wait for the first of January to start using. And I would be so excited to start using it. Various years of my life, a journal would be started, in earnest, on 01 January.
And after a few days, for whatever reason, I would miss a few days. And I would hate that there were blank pages. I’ve always been an all-or-nothing kind of person.
And then I would read what I had written over the last few weeks, and critique not just what words were there, but the handwriting and the pen (or, heaven forbid, pens) that I had used to write with. But I was especially hard on the words. What I had thought was brilliant at the time of writing (often just a few short weeks prior) had become drivel. I mean, I was doing this to myself at 7 years old.
Fast forward to autumn of the same year. I would find that diary and decide that I would try to give it another go. Blank pages be damned! And so a mostly empty diary would be given new life as I wrote in it again for another solid 10 or 15 days. And then it would be abandoned again, just as it had been before.
Eventually I would find that diary tucked away a year or two later and read it again, thoroughly embarrassed by the absolute garbage I had written. And what do you do with garbage? You burn it. Oh, the bonfires of words I have enjoyed. So many.
I’m only bringing this up (feel free to leave a “cool story bro” in the comments) because it struck me this weekend that my blog follows the same pattern. Like this blog in Janaury, I seem to remember that all my shiny new diaries, so full of promise, always started with the same sentence: “This time I’m going to try writing every day…”
