Things We Keep

My journaling habit first kicked into gear in the mid-90s. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, advised writing morning pages every day—three was the magic number. Mine were just scribbles, really. Three pages to clear my mind and maybe unclog creative impulses. Cameron gave me permission to write whatever I wanted without fear of exposure. No one would see my morning pages but me. Over the years, when busy with a job and kids, I couldn’t find the quiet space or time to journal consistently. Other times, it was the only thing that kept me sane. I’ve been faithful in journaling daily, though, for the last four or five years. Those notebooks sit on a shelf in my home office today, neatly arranged by date. There’s something comforting about their presence, just beyond arm’s reach.

In high school, I wrote some very bad poetry and a few short essays. The collection was gathered in a pocket folder with brads. It couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty pages. Mostly expressions of teenage angst. A graded assignment on which my English teacher wrote “You’ll be a writer someday!” A poem comparing my crush on a classmate to a tree; the points of analogy escape me now. When I married at eighteen, I concluded I was too mature for silly teenage rants and naïve poetry and the folder went in the trash. I was in my thirties and a mother of two adolescents when a longing to remember who I’d once been and what I’d once felt took hold, but the reminders were gone.

Some years later, years in which I periodically adopted then discarded a morning pages habit, we hosted a Vietnamese exchange student. The young man was arrogant and rude; he lied to get admitted to the program and had nothing but disdain for Americans. I worked on a novel while he was in school, but his presence in our home was unsettling and disrupted any hope of creativity. My morning page rants calmed me and kept me from voicing my irritations aloud. My goal was to endure. The following spring, when the student finally boarded a plane for home, I was exhausted. By that time, my journal had been colored with broad emotional swings from frustration to relief, and a lot in between.

When we moved from Oklahoma to Texas in 2019, I had a couple of drawers and shelves full of journals and novel drafts. We were downsizing. I scanned the notebooks but didn’t really read them. I’d since decided I was not a fiction writer, so what relevance could novel plot outlines and character sketches have to me? I didn’t need reminders of the frustrating year we’d spent with our exchange student. I pulled out a few travel diaries among the journals and threw the rest in the recycle bin. We’d only been in our new home a few months before I regretted tossing them. I’d decided to finish the memoir I started a dozen years before, and suddenly I was missing vital dates and reflections. It turns out memory isn’t always an accurate data keeper.

Not long after our move, I led a workshop on daily journaling as a spiritual practice and suggested that reviewing past entries is a useful exercise in observing personal growth. Since then, I’ve been journaling daily, but I haven’t taken my own advice about reviewing past entries until recently. As I write this, there is a composition book on the shelf next to my desk with scrawled notes going back to early 2022, before my first memoir was published, but after I’d begun the second one. It begins with a record of lessons from a memoir writing class I took in February or March of that year. I drafted pieces based on exercises or prompts like “What is truth calling me to change now?” or “What question(s) does your book ask?” Some free writes involved identifying conflict, crisis, inciting incident, or external vs. internal changes.

Written in various color inks (green is my favorite!) over the next two-plus years are responses to dozens of succeeding class exercises or free writes. One was a six-word memoir. My response: “Smug do-gooder. Humble teacher. Fierce advocate.” It described a transformative later-in-life career teaching science to teen moms, which is the subject of my second memoir. Shortly after this class ended, my husband and I took a vacation to Hawaii, and a week’s worth of travel diary is embedded there. There’s another account of a trip visiting family and friends in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey that fall.

Along with class notes and travel diaries, the notebook includes various meeting minutes, lists of chapter topics for my memoir-in-progress, and notes jotted while on the phone. This isn’t my only active journal. I’ve got two more. One is my morning meditational journal, a spiral bound book with a decorative cover. It’s on an end table in my office near where I sit for my morning tea and meditational reading. I write a couple of pages in it every morning, in response to a reading or to a dilemma; my words help clarify my thoughts. The third is another inexpensive composition book that resides next to my bed to capture ideas I’m afraid will be lost. I think I’ve finally realized the value of keeping a record of where I’ve been and what I was thinking while I was there.

My husband’s asked if he should destroy my journals if I die before he does. I told him to do whatever he wants with them—I won’t need them in the afterlife. I’m sure no one else will want to read them, and I don’t think they’re incriminating (which may explain why no one will be interested). However, I won’t make the mistake of throwing them out. These I’ll keep, even if I have to cram boxes of notebooks under my bed someday.

I’m not the same person I was when we moved to Texas in 2019; I’m not who I was last year. I fully inhabit my life in 2024, and I’m open to how life will change me in the future. But who knows when I’ll need to mine my morning pages for hard-won truths? Even taxing years teach lessons; it’s worth keeping reminders of how those lessons shaped me.