his day, you can use words to let your soul sing its song.
The practice keeps you in touch with your feelings, a valve releasing the steam whenever the pressure builds up.
There is no best-before age to write a journal. Sir Walter Scott started his journal at the age of 54, Mencken at 50, Charles Darwin at 25, Queen Victoria from the age of 13.
Reasons
You don’t need a reason to climb into your cupboard and write, but there are many good reasons, almost as many reasons as there are journal writers.
One friend of a friend who had threatened and tried suicide several times, to the despair of his family, was advised by his psychiatrist to keep a daily journal–which he did. The result was that life did become more significant to him and he became more interested in living than dying.
Similarly, a character in one of Erica Jong’s novels gave the heroine a beautiful cloth-bound book in which she inscribed, “Here is a book to save your life.”
The dust cover to the Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky reads,
“Vaslav Nijinsky, the ‘God of the Dance’ was on the verge of mental breakdown when he wrote this diary as an outlet for his views on religion, art, love and life…”
Your life, however, may not be in such dramatic straights requiring the buoyancy of the paper pages to keep you afloat. You may simply and quietly need to craft a thought, call it your own, and keep it in a safe place.
Getting it out of your head.
There are times when you have plans; you learn, do and try, and then someone is standing in your way. (So many of our plans go into the big wastebasket of dreams.)
Or someone confronts you unexpectedly and you are caught in the headlights without a suitable comeback.
Or you don’t get the job you applied for and it really hurts. You feel miserably rejected.
In your journal you can verbally kick the person with steel-toed boots without the fear of criminal charges. You can write out the reasons why you may not have got the job, why you were disappointed and then you can gradually let it go instead of having it thump painfully over and over in your head.
If you can let go of the anger, you often find another door opens and that may turn out to be more suitable for you anyway. So by letting go of the wrath in your journal, you cleared the way for another opportunity to come along
The need to be understood.
The journal often fills the need in your life to be understood and can be a pleasant conversation on a topic of your choice without the pressure of trying to get your opinion in before the topic changes or the humiliation of saying something not quite tasteful at the wrong time (4 letters) or misreading the seriousness of the discussion and laughing at inappropriate times as I did recently when informed that the spouse of a male acquaintance had run off with another man. The idea of a person “running off” with someone struck me funny as I visualized these two furtive characters running down the street, coats flaring, bags flapping clothes along the pavement, kissing on the run, getting hair in their mouths as the wind whips past them in their rush, and I burst out laughing. However, the news was earnestly related by the wronged partner in great consternation and laughing was not well received. Nor could I adequately explain the callous frivolity of such an ill-placed sense of humor.
The journal isn’t a substitute for social discourse but a brief respite from the tensions of expectation in which you can dissipate your angst and regain some self respect.
The journal as companion
The journal can also be a necessary companion, a companion that doesn’t put you down, and always speaks just to you. It is hanging on to the private core of your being when the rest of your life is peopled with people who don’t understand or are infinitely more important than you.
James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary in 1946,
“Why do I resume this diary which three months ago I brought to an end? There is no explanation. I merely missed it like an old friend…I treated, and shall continue treating, my diary like an intimate friend who mustn’t know everything. If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary–a poor substitute, but better than nothing .”
Reading the Cosmic Waves
There are days when I have captured the essence of an idea, and put the brilliant thought into a journal entry. Later I find that a dozen other people have written exactly the same thing tens or hundreds of years ago, but it still makes me feel good to think I came up with the idea myself.
These ‘cosmic’ thoughts or synchronicity of ideas touch on the mystery of the whole thinking and knowing process and is discussed in the chapter on Imagination. The discussion of these and other subjects is not an attempt at pop psychology (or academic psychology) but is derived from the observations of a journal writer trained to look at the interconnectedness between who we are to what we do, to who we are compared to who we live and associate with, and who we are in the larger natural environment.
Belonging – Your Position in the World
Years ago, I asked one of my neighbours, who was a reformed alcoholic, if he had trouble not drinking. “Never,” said Norm, the horse trainer, “There’s so much to do all the time. I just get high on life.”
And that’s what journal writing can be all about, getting high on life and your position in it. Often when I have a new class of freshmen (freshpeople?) in September who are feeling very alien to the campus and city, (most of the students come from out of town), I try to help them relax by telling them that the people who belong at the University are the people who pay their tuition and want to be there.
“There are lots of beautiful people who laugh in groups and seem to know everyone, and know how to work the system and just seem to belong. But they don’t belong anymore than you do. You are just as important as the suave-looking socialites. If the truth were known, probably half of those people are repeating courses they have failed.”
I tell them I don’t want to see anyone hiding behind their trench coat. I want the students to contribute to the class like the important people that they are.
“No one can contribute what you can contribute because no one will see what you see with your unique upbringing, your genetic inheritance, and your life experience.”
When they realize that I am not going to single them out for ridicule, they relax. So much self-consciousness disappears and they start to learn, and many even enjoy the learning process.
And everyone can do that in their lives not just their school life. You can be proud of who you are when you realize you belong, with all the rights necessary to live in this world, and you have every right to develop your life so that you are proud to be alive. You are in this life, and you do belong.
History of the Journal
