40-plus years, and counting

Last March, I marked 40 years of keeping a diary or journal almost daily. It’s so foundational to who I am that diary or journal doesn’t quite capture what the practice means to me, it’s impact on my life at any given stage, and how it’s shaped who I am. Or should I say who it’s been possible for me to be?

I did not mark the occasion last March because I missed it. I missed it because I had it in my head that the 40th anniversary of my journal keeping was in MAY (1982).

So in MAY 2022 when I pulled out that first flowered corduroy book to reflect on the milestone, I was surprised to see I’d missed the actual day!

And by May of last year, I was dribbling off the table of the newspaper career I had ping ponged into the summer before. I was in transition (again), and not in a reflective state of mind.

So I put that inaugural volume of personal writing back on the shelf and walked away.

How could I miss it? At the time, I shrugged it off because I didn’t want it to be the very big deal that it was. You do something nearly every day for 40 years and you’re only just 51 at the anniversary of it, and you miss it?!?

I don’t know what I had in mind to do to celebrate, but I wanted to do something. I wasn’t looking for a party so much as a ritual to honor whatever inspired me to think writing was something I could do, and for continuing to do it pretty much no matter what. That’s sort of heroic, right?

There is no trophy or prize, but in my acceptance speech for the privilege of having a writing practice, I want to thank God, the Universe, every single teacher I ever had who fanned my flames, all the readers of various projects who sent me notes, students who shared their own stories, and everyone everywhere for all time.

What’s been published is maybe an eighth of what I’ve actually written, but it was enough to help me imagine a writer is something I can be. Maybe even more than that. I writer is something I am.

I would say more lest you get the idea that I think I am “all that” because I’m a writer. But that’s a new thread that requires much additional narrative stitching.

I suppose I am just in time for the 41st anniversary of keeping a journal in about a month.

But more than marking the day an 11-year-old child first picked up a pen, I want to do something with this enormous body of work. It’s just piled up … well, like dead bodies … for over 40 years.

What do you do with decades of diaries? I’d hate for just about anyone to ever read them. I know intimately, painfully, and life-alteringly the cost of someone else rummaging around in my private pages, assigning their own meanings to my experiences, and punishing me for the offense of telling my stories to myself.

Better to burn the whole lot than ever go through that again.

But how can I do that to all the people I’ve been? The child who recorded what she ate at a family cookout? The lovelorn teenager. The young woman lost in the missing years. The new mother, grieving daughter, valiant single parent making ends meet as a college adjunct, scrappy community journalist.

I may be the only one who can read their stories with true compassion, now that I am not them, and yet all of them combined.

Those are not just books on the shelves. They are whole lives. I lived them. And they await my kind eyes.