Welcome to Keeping A Journal

Last week, I wrote about "being a writer". So this week I might as well follow up with another post about writing. It makes sense in my version of logic.

I've kept a journal in and off since as far back as I can remember. I think I received my first journal in  1st or 2nd grade. There were very few entries and the handwriting is pretty much impossible to read. It wasn't until I went to Japan that I really started taking the art of keeping a journal seriously.

Before my trip to Japan, I was presented with a lovely journal that I was told to use to record my trip. This was before the age of travel blogs (the Internet was just becoming a household utility) and even if they had been known, I doubt young me would have been allowed to have one (especially with my terrible spelling and grammar). Initially I didn't write all that much. However my aunt felt that this would be an excellent opportunity to practice good penmanship and insisted that I write in it as often as possible.

She also had me do many penmanship exercises on the days we didn't have any outings, but I digress.

For six weeks, I wrote about my adventures in Japan. I am so glad I did. I admit, I do cringe a little when I reread my writing style from back then, but there are so many little things that I would have forgotten without that journal. It's been a long time since that trip, but it was my first taste of international travel.

My aunt also told me how my grandmother (her mother), kept journals during all their trips when she was alive. My grandmother had died when I was very young and I wanted to be like her in the stories everyone told me. I made an effort to write as much as young me could with my limited attention span.

There were many more travel journals. Some only have a few entries in them, others have multiple trips and a highlight of my likes and dislikes. I even have a journal that as a school assignment for my 8th grade English teacher after my parents pulled me out of school for a trip. Its fun seeing how much my writing has changed since that first trip.

It was only recently that I was able to read my grandmother's journals. They are very interesting and maybe someday I'll have a version of them written up. My grandfather did a lot of international work and he brought the family with him (my dad has his own version of many of the stories I read). My grandmother's journals give a unique insight to that time in history as well as many different cultures that are rarely covered in US history text books.

In highschool, I had a journal that wasn't really a journal. I didn't write about my day to day activities not did I make an effort to document anything of extreme importance. I actually used it to write poems, draw silly pictures, and short stories. It's a bit bizarre to go back and look at that one. The inner workings of a high schooler are a bit like navigating reading a Lewis Carroll novel (see what I did there?).

My college journal was a lot different. There aren't any poems (well maybe one or two), fewer drawings, and there's a lot more reflection in what I was doing at the time I was writing. It's both a log of events and a place where I vented all my emotions. It was therapeutic and what I needed. Heaven help me if I had tried blogging in college (actually I did, but that's not important).

That's partially why I really like keeping a journal (in addition to a blog). It's where I put my more personal writings that certainly don't belong on the Internet. I'm not very good at keeping up with the one I have now, but it serves it's purpose when I need it to. That's what is important.

As I've written, this blog is more or less a log of me trying to navigate through the so called "adult world". My journal is me trying to make sense of that world. I might flip through it at times to see how much I've progressed (or my lack of). I recommend keeping a journal. Sometimes writing everything down helps. It everything out onto paper so that the mind can organize it. Having a travel journal is also fun and I can go back to remind myself of what I did on a trip.

A journal doesn't need to be fancy. A composition notebook works just as nicely as a fancy leather bound book from a fancy store. A blog is good too, but remember this is the Internet. People don't have to be nice and anyone can find you.

A journal can be a great friend...unless it's possessed by young Lord Voldemort, Tom Riddle Jr. Then you might want to stab it with a baselisk's fang.

Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me. Now I'm off to find a baselisk's fang!