Let’s get personal for a minute.
Have you ever felt stuck before? Like somehow all personal growth stopped at 24 years old even though your ID says you are north of 30, and your knees like to pretend that they’re 75. Until pretty recently, this is how I would have describe myself. Mentally stuck at 24 years old and ill-equipped to move beyond that point in life. But today, I have exciting news…
I have less than ten pages left in my journal!
And I get it, you’re probably thinking: “What the… how is this news?” But when I tell you that the written word and I have a tumultuous history, I really mean it. Like I genuinely struggled with learning to read until I was 13 or 14 years old, granted once I got it, I became a voracious reader. By the time I was 15 I was getting in trouble for reading instead of doing my chores, which was a bit of a dilemma, because how are you supposed to discipline a kid who finally learned how to read? However, even with my new found success in reading, it wasn’t due to mastery of phonics or some traditional method like that; give me a new word and I would have to ask someone how to pronounce it, or I would look it up in the dictionary on our computer so it could read it to me.
I remember one time when my mom asked me how I got so good at reading, I confessed that I gave up on trying to sound words out all the time, and just memorized them instead (kind of like how they say if you learn the 100-200 of the most commonly used words, you can speak a new language. It’s like that, but the language was reading). I didn’t really get good at phonics until college. First my humanities professor did a lesson on etymologies, and talked about how English is mostly built on the foundations of Latin, Greek, and German. Then I took Spanish, which is Latin based and actually has consistent pronunciation rules, and then all of a sudden… Eureka! I finally understood phonics.
Ultimately, with the amount of mental gymnastics it took for me to even read, the idea of organizing my thoughts and retaining them long enough to get them into a written format was bordering on torture until I was about 22 years old. So while I loved how journals looked and romanticized the idea of pouring your soul out onto the page, my execution of journaling on a regular basis has been lacking, for decades.
So this journal of mine, that I have carried around in backpacks and purses, and shoved on shelves and in boxes over the last 16 plus years, is finally almost finished. This otherwise insignificant collection of papers, which contains confessions, declarations, prayers, dreams, diagrams of car crashes, and more than one multi-year gap in writing, has also reminded me of how far I have come in the last decade and a half. I am no longer the young woman who cries over writing term papers, because here I am writing a blog, of my own volition, as a hobby!
Rereading it has also been oddly therapeutic, because it has felt like I am getting to step back in time and relive those moments with my younger self, but as an older, wiser, and more confident companion on the journey. Reliving the pain, the hurt, and the confusion, but getting to almost comfort that part of me because I have made it to the other side of those heartaches. Getting to reminisce with my younger self about travel adventures and cute guys. Laughing at funny little anecdotes and pondering over the fact that although I started this journal around 16 years ago, 25% of its pages were only filled in over the last 12 months.
Anyways, thanks for joining me as I recognize the growth that this little accomplishment signifies. Wishing you good health and the ability to enjoy the journey along the way.
Sojourn Nation 