A part of me laughs reading about
Suleika Jaouad’s journaling practice
The seriousness behind it
The intentionality
I starting journaling
Keeping a diary
Because Elizabeth Wakefield in Sweet Valley High kept a diary
And, because she was the nerdier book-smart twin,
I wanted to be like her
I wrote in code for a bit
To deter prying eyes
But gave it up when my boyfriend (who was studying computer science) figured it out in a few minutes
I still remember the code
My high school friends teased that I would journal on my honeymoon
I did, for the record (haha)
And my (then) husband didn’t mind

I got my first diary for my 10th birthday
Hard cover, blue, with an art nouveau illustration of a woman clutching an armful of fruit on the front, and scented pastel colored pages
Thirty years later there are over 70 journals sitting on the bookshelf
“Lockable” dairies with pale pink pages
Exercise books that I covered with white paper and words cut out from magazines
Lovely leather-bound books with hand-made paper
Pretty cloth-bound books from fancy stationery stores
And even one I made at camp
Mostly there are notebooks of varying sizes,
Books that were easy to carry in my backpack
For writing on the bus or the train
Or, on lucky luxurious days, while hurtling through mid-air on a Boeing bound for someplace else
The pages are filled with angst and dreams, crushes and heartbreaks, joys and boring day-to-day minutiae
Ticket stubs and bits of brochures and seemingly significant fortune cookie predictions
The diaries are not particularly profound
They’re not the record of a historically significant person
I have no idea what will happen to them when I’m gone
But they’re my most prized possession

After I got sick I fell out of the habit
There was so much to say, I couldn’t say anything at all
But I did make an attempt of keeping up with morning pages
A habit started in my mid-twenties
And now I have 31 spiral bound 5-subject notebooks to accompany the journals
Pages and pages of streams of consciousness scribbles

And if I think about it, I also have over a decade of blog posts to add the pile
Poems and scribblings and reflections
Tracing my desire to find the beauty, find the joy, find the light
Amidst break-ups and falling in love and moving away and falling love again and moving away again and cancer and to trying to find the light again

It has been delightfully fun to follow the prompts in Suleika’s book
My favorites so far have included
Write with your non-dominant hand (Marie Howe)
Write a paragraph about the funniest thing to happen to you from the perspective of an inanimate object (Kiese Laymon)
What would you write if you weren’t afraid? (Dani Shapiro)

What would you write if you weren’t afraid?

When you spend a sunny late spring afternoon
Hanging out in Central Park
In a shady spot beneath tall trees
With a lovely group of folks
Some you’ve known for a few years now
Others you just met today
And you eat pizza and cookies and candy
And chat about theatre and shows and Beyonce
And tie-dye clothes with brightly colored ink
You feel like you are five again
In the best possible way
And you head home
With a heart full of light.

I had a wish
To live in a place
Where I could eat breathe and sleep theatre
Talk about theatre all day long
Immerse myself in a world of musicals and plays and art
And how do you know what you want til you get what you want and you see if you like it?
Well I’m here
And pardon my French
But I fucking love it
I’ve had the most excellent fortune
To see literally hundreds of shows
And it never gets old
The thrill of walking into a theatre
And wondering what magic awaits
To be handed your playbill
And rifling through the names
Oh I remember her from -
I loved them in -
And increasingly
Having had the pleasure of actually working the people on the stage and behind the scenes
Going to the Performing Arts Library to watch archival recordings on a weekly basis
If my sixteen year old self could see me now!