SEVENTY-SEVEN JOURNALS


I first began writing a personal journal on June 23rd, 1963. I was twenty-seven, had been married almost seven years, and my full time job was taking care of our three preschoolers. I was angry and had scared myself with that anger.

I’ve recently reread my shelf and a half of raggedy eight by ten spiral notebooks -- seventy-seven in total. The biggest challenge was trying to decipher the faded pages as well as my often-illegible handwriting. Another twenty-four smaller travel notebooks await my curiosity and patience.

So, I’ve been keeping company with my journal for fifty-seven years off and on. I’ve thought of it as a portable friend – ready to listen at any time of the day or night. Some entries are as brief as a sentence; others (especially in the divorce years between 1973 and 1983) go on and on and on for dozens of pages.

I was struck by the dizzying emotional roller coaster they chronicle. Almost fifty years of off the wall mania and staggering bouts of depression before I was diagnosed as bipolar II and began to receive treatment a few years ago.

And I was amazed by the distortion of memory that summarizes and twists facts to fit. I found how often I lie to myself, and tell others the same lies. For instance I’ve often said, “I didn’t talk to grownups until I was over forty.” I love the drama in that statement, especially when contrasted with my current proclivity to talk too much (just like my mother by the way!). What’s true is I didn’t feel comfortable talking to grownups until I was over forty. What’s true is that I’m an uncomfortable amalgam of my father’s taciturnity and my mother’s excessive verbosity.

I didn’t talk much at home because every time I did I got into trouble. Home meaning the dozen or more places my mother found to live. Every time we moved my brother and I had to leave important things behind. Around my mother I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And, in retrospect, I think when I did speak up or express my opinion I shocked her in some way. Home meaning the five different houses that witnessed the best and the worst of my nineteen year marriage. In my marriage verbal abuse was slung back and forth, much of it in the guise of humor. I see now how often I collaborated to make myself an easy target.

My raggedy journals have captured raw emotion, quiet introspection, and way too many Dr.-Phil-like analyses and self-improvement programs. Nevertheless I see clearly the advantages of journal keeping; although I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of leaving them behind to bewilder and shock my children. That consideration aside, my journal is a primary form of self-expression, a safety valve, an emotional catharsis. Most of all it functions as a reality check; a place to recognize the disconnections between what I say and what I actually do; a repository of lies and half-truths; a halfway house for unacceptable feelings.

A terrific fringe benefit has been that the more I was willing to learn about myself the more I seemed to know about other people which went a long ways toward closing the gap between myself as a self-styled loner and many of those others.