So one morning, before I began writing on page 210, I proved to myself that my 240-page journal actually is 240 pages long, by numbering pages 211 to 240 once and for all. And I found myself with only 30 pages to fill before I complete a 20th journal. (Note to self: Almost time to buy a new journal.)
I started a number of journals over the years; I started the first journal I ever finished in October 2011, and it took me until June 2015 to get to the last page. Truth be told, writing every day in the journal did not become a habit until mid-April 2015, when my words started sprawling across the pages almost unbidden and I found it was something I needed to do.
Here we are now, after almost eight years of journal-journal-journaling through 20 previously blank books of scribbles and ideas and rants and all.
(And for some reason, the next thing I wrote was the following.)
I’m feeling a little crazy this morning, my pen wandering free over the pages — wait, did I just use something free to illustrate something crazy? Is freedom is a crazy concept? Are we nuts when we want to be free? No! No! I refuse to believe it!
Is there a meaning and a purpose to all of this, and what if there’s not? What if we’re all just making it up as we go along, and life is merely one long meandering stream of consciousness? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It gets us off the hook for all the madness we’re responsible for. What a laugh. What a joke. What a jolt.
“He doesn’t mean it, folks; he’s just doing a mental exercise letting his brain fly wherever it wants.”
Who was that, expressing himself between quotation marks? That, my friends, is the self-editor/self-censor who reaches into my free-journaling brain and says, “OMG, what will people think if they see me writing something like that?” instead of just letting loose. Good grief, do I hate that. Off I go on a flight of fancy or some ridiculous notion and this bonehead brain of mine breaks in and says, “Uh oh, tut tut tut, mustn’t fly too high or explore dark thoughts, love, oh no, stay safe, don’t cross any lines that someone may misunderstand, none of that now, dear, no no no — YES. Just YES. Enough of the no.
(When the self-censor strikes, sometimes we need to resist. Sometimes our darkest thoughts lead us into the light. In this case, the light was this: We are conditioned to believe that freedom is a crazy concept, but we are born free; we need to be free in order to be healthy.)