The rumours are true, la vita e bella.
Be forewarned that I'm about to get real and if you came for the silly, today ain't it.
THIS IS JUST FOR READING AND YOU MIGHT NOT DIG IT.
When packing up my belongings on Drolet last month, I opted not to carry on with my journals begun in 1993. Not that I wouldn't keep writing, just that I wouldn't keep my past at arm's length for easy but often aggravating reference.
If you hadn't already heard, I remember everything that ever happened ever. It's a slight exaggeration but ever so slight. Seriously.
I also have a compulsion to write everything down and keep track of the most inane things, like how I bought an AERO chocolate bar on March 17th, 1996 at 5:27 pm at IGA in a small-town Alberta small-town with name that means nothing to me because we were probably only passing through.
Truth be told, a lot of the things I wrote in the early to mid-90s, are certified gut-busters, I'm telling you, this shit is funny. The high school parts are relatively amusing in a cringe-worthy way that is sometimes sad but pretty vital if I ever hope to be grown-up and have some real understanding of what it's like to be a teenager in a way that allows me to be friends with two or three of them, maybe even some I made with someone who is cool, who knows.
Notice I said teenager and not teen. It's because I'm being serious. And being a teen is serious stuff.
Without them in front of me, I can think of nine journals amassed since grade 2. They sit safely in my parents basement, or maybe in the closet I always closed before I went to sleep when I was small, so as to not be taunted by the 6'4 faceless man in a trenchcoat that hung out in there scaring the shit out of me.
My high school ramblings are plagued by a now painfully obvious sense of self-censorship that started to evaporate when I turned 18. I used to write the truth and apologize for it in the same sentence, as though the people that loved or hurt me would need an explanation.
It's funny because I never even realized that writing was my favourite thing until a couple of years ago, but I wrote in a way that oddly anticipated readers and I know that in reading the once-private ramblings of writers I admire, like Joyce Carol Oates, they are most gripping in that they were not written for me but for she or he who wrote them.
My journals over the past six years are the real deal, and they are for me, which isn't to say that I don't in the back of my mind consider that my truths may be unearthed eventually by someone other than myself. I guess I think that at that point I will be long gone and it will not really matter who I offend with my loves and loathes and pretensions.
It's not so much that my journals are filled with secrets, more so extensions of what people close to me are already aware of but that I would not like to overwhelm them with. There are times I wish I could have talked more than I wrote but I think I'm learning.
This year has been particularly overwhelming and particularly not at all what I would have anticipated a year ago this month. Keeping track of myself in writing will go on forever, but I'm going to try to put more talking into the mix as I wish I'd done after my accident last summer which set off some major bummer feelings that I failed to acknowledge or begin to deal with until it all went from major to majorly major.
A lot of fear and anxiety came about near the end of last summer, and I kind of tried to pretend I didn't feel different except in a great way that offered me a renewed lust for life. I didn't want to feel anything but lucky and happy but walking the walk is easier said than done. There was a particular hospital happening that became the most terrifying night of my entire life because I honestly felt that I was going to die and since you're not me that might seem ridiculous because I was talking the talk a month later but I felt different with a thousand new worries about everyone and everything I couldn't control and it sucked so I tried to pretend I felt happy-go-lucky but I didn't. And when I realized how much pretending I'd been doing it was like MAJOR TSUNAMI, LOOK OUT! But it was too late.
My regrets have shrunk by a thousand in the past month or two and I am filled with the reassurance that every era of lameness brings some light and also with the good fortune of having a sunny disposition that sometimes hides but is never really gone.
What was I talking about?? Oh that's right, journals.
Soanyway, it's all fine and well to record your life as it passes but also pretty important to live it and not dwell on all the shit you wrote too soon, at least not for five or ten years when your perspective has multiplied by nine thousand.
Too often I have looked in the way too recent past to understand why things unfolded as they did and usually my writing is just a way more gut-wrenching look at what is already gut-wrenching in my memory, so it's not exactly beneficial.
My journals ought not to be burned but I realize that I carry enough of myself with me when I'm naked as it is, so off they go to Ottawa.
This has been all over the place but what I wanted to tell you is that people are good. Packing up my life on Drolet the week after my holiday in June, I realized that the slightly overripe pea-green leather notebook I began in March was nowhere to be found. It wasn't in Ottawa, it wasn't in my apartment, I hadn't remembered seeing it since our holiday but I couldn't fathom how I could have let such a heartfelt record of myself disappear like that.
The cool thing was that I knew I was feeling happy and good about myself again because it didn't make me cry. And it wasn't because I'd become numb to feeling bummers, it was because I knew that whether or not I had record on paper of the way I felt, I was in touch with myself and true to myself.
For a far-away stranger with no knowledge of the people or places I wrote about, it would certainly make for a juicy summer read...
When they finished they could file it between The Bell Jar and Prozac Nation!
Or would this stranger be someone who shares the compulsion to write things down and make it their mission to return my tome to me...
Now and then I have scolded myself for my carelessness; missed the buttery green leather and the soft white ribbon that kept my place. But these moments have been thankfully fleeting.
So you know that Christina Aguilera song where she says they say if you love something let it go??
The saying is something about if it comes back, you never lost it.
If I never got my little green journal back, would the pieces of myself I put in it just disappear?? The answer is no! Lucky me!
I let go of the security I thought I got from having my life records at arm's length and wouldn't you know it, yesterday I got an e-mail from a sweet little lady named Monica in les Iles de la Madeleine and she will be sending me my little green notebook shortly.
I'll be glad to have it back but I'm going to do something I've never done before. I am going to put it away before I have a chance to review it enough that the slivers of photographic memory I have effortlessly blow it open to the lowest of lows, although miles and miles away from the tangible pages themselves.
I lost something else last month that I thought would make me more upset than it did.
On January first of this year, I wrote myself a letter to be opened ten years later by an infinitely older and wiser version of myself.
I had had a conversation the night before that opened doors I thought I had closed, and unearthed feelings I was unaware existed. I realized that everything I had felt somewhat sure about was actually pretty all over the place, but sealing these thoughts in a self-addressed stamped envelope kept them at a distance without disregarding them entirely. Even though my journal was just for me, writing about what may or may not be in ten years with complete honesty was too much to have at my fingertips. So I sealed it up and sent it away, and continued to to do this at the beginning of every month.
June got lost though. And July was never written. But it's okay, I'm okay with it!
Now I see that these letters I refuse to rip open for at least a decade were a sort of preparation for letting go of the words I allow to weigh more than they should.
Words and memories will always dance around in my head begging to be written down and this is sometimes seriously annoying but ultimately I think it's a good thing.
So the final thought is get your innards out in whichever way suits you, but try not to think too much. Less thinking, more living. L-I-V-I-N. With a reasonable amount of caution, of course.
