...to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be..." Joan Didion

When I was nine, I felt frustrated by the adults around me, who seemed to have forgotten that they had once been children, too. They functioned in an air space that floated many heads above mine and when they occasionally turned their attention down towards me, it was in a perfunctory way that proved they had no idea how to relate to the scope of a nine-year-old's world. Determined never to become that kind of adult, I started keeping a journal. I'm not certain who provided me with my first journal - probably my mother (one of those adults) - it had a blue cloth cover, sprayed with a pattern of tiny strawberries. Admittedly, I did not end up filling up the first journal, but it did kick off a lifelong practice. (Thank you, Mom.)

In 40 years of journaling, my intentions and habits have evolved, as have the aesthetics of the journals themselves. I went from tiny strawberries to Sesame Street to cloth-bound journals embroidered with dragons, which I got at Urban Outfitters, to Moleskine to hardbound Leuchtterm 1917's. I started off by addressing my entries as "Dear diary," and then in middle school went through a period of writing to a non-religious god. In high school and college, the frequency with which I wrote was erratic and intense. Right after my children were born, I went through long stretches of writing in journals dedicated to their daily antics and noteworthy milestones.

My journaling practice of the last 12 years has been the most consistent, which is to write every single morning after yoga and my first sip of coffee. I fill 250-page journals in an average of five months. I write with Pilot Frixion pens, in blue ink. After each journal is filled, I go through and highlight key words and themes that show up often, and write them down in the index. After noting these patterns, I don't re-read my journals again.

I began journaling as a form of resistance, as a way to remember who I once was. The Didion quote above, in its entirety, is from her essay, "On keeping a notebook," where she writes -

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Having a sense of who we used to be keeps us honest and humble. But I don't think my journals serve as record. Sometimes, when my husband and I disagree on when an event happened, I offer to go check "my books" to settle the dispute, but in truth, I never do. I write in my journals because I can't not. To borrow from, and paraphrase another one of Didion's excellent lines - I write to figure out what I think. When I write, I hardly know what I'm writing because I'm barely awake and much of what I'm figuring is something that had been on my mind the previous day and had just spent the night swimming in the waters of my dreams. But the very act of writing - the physical movement of the pen gliding across the page - clicks something into place, and that tiny moment of clicking awakens my mind and opens my eyes to something that is - ironically - above, underneath, through, and beyond language. And it is with that sense of un-articulable understanding that I wake into the day.