My story begins with a dream. Doesn’t every story? Aren’t we all able to dream when we are little and the world isn’t so big? Too big for us to doubt the possibilities of us actually becoming what we envision ourselves to be.
I started writing in a diary when I was in middle school. It was before reading Diary of Anne Frank, but even still, that book impressed upon me the possibility that keeping a diary could be more than just some words about your day written down and later forgotten as one moved into adulthood. I was extremely glad that Anne Frank kept a diary and decided that keeping one myself was a worthwhile thing to do.
The problem I had was that the moment I wrote the honest truth in my diary, I started to panic. There was only one truth written there, and yet I knew that if anyone in my family read it I would be in trouble. And what were the chances that no one would read it?
In fact, it wasn’t but a few weeks later, just as I was relaxing my grip on the diary, that my little sister confessed to having read the first page. She gave me a nod and a wink, saying that “she knew.”
I panicked. I raged. But then, I couldn’t tell my mother why I raged so much except that my sister had violated my privacy. Telling the full truth between my mother and I wasn’t something common while I was growing up. It amazes me now that I have a twelve-year-old and she actually asks real questions, expecting real answers from me. She asks me things I never would have dreamed of asking my mother. I cherish this truthfulness. But it also terrifies me.
You see, even after reading Anne Frank’s diary and seeing what a beautiful thing it was to be honest and truthful about life, I couldn’t do it. We didn’t talk about anxiety back in the 80s and 90s. All I knew was that my heart would race and I would feel a bit faint, perhaps too hot or too cold, at the idea of someone finding and reading my diary. I had several secrets that I was keeping from the world. Secrets that would bring consequences to me immediately.
Like the fact that my stepfather at the time was not my father but we all pretended he was my father to the world and to my younger brother and sister. Like the fact that my biological father never called, never showed up and there were no photos of him anywhere. We were not to talk about him. And not very least, the fact that I was being abused by a member of the family for years.
Not writing the full truth at a younger age had consequences in my later years. No matter how many journals I filled, I didn’t seem to really get at the heart of things many times. There were many days that I felt like all I did was drone on or complain. Then there would be the days and weeks in which I just felt like I had nothing to say (all the while I always had thoughts circling in my head, many times unable to stop them and needing them to get out).
Despite not having journaled corrected or whole-heartedly for most of my life, I do have a healthy respect for journaling in general. I think it’s a great way for us to get out thoughts out, to process through what is happening or has happened and I think it’s a wonderful way to get down who we are in ink.
I truly believe that each and every one of our lives is a story worth telling. The problem is that we never write the story down, and memory fades and confidence wobbles. We either don’t feel like we have anything to say and so don’t write it down or we can’t think of how or where to begin and so don’t write it down.
And that’s how our story stays in the dust of history.
I’m not saying that our stories will be printed as many times as The Diary of Anne Frank’s, but that doesn’t matter as much. It isn’t because our stories aren’t as worthy, it’s simply because not everything in this world is valued equally.
But if we write down our thoughts and our lives, we will have that for us. For our family. For our children. How many people wish that their grandparents or parents had written down a few more stories about their lives before they had passed on? I do. I love reading old letters that my grandparents kept, seeing a part of themselves and their lives that is more intimate. Words on paper come out deeper than word spoken into the air. Words on paper are put down to last forever.
These days I still journal, though I take a different approach. I trust my husband not to read my journal, but at the same time, I don’t think about that so much. I challenge myself to write every day for some months and then others I simply do it when I can. There are still stretches of time when I don’t pick up my pen even though it is probably exactly what I should do. Bad habit, I suppose.
The benefits of journaling are too numerous to ignore.