This past weekend I went out of town, and when I got back on Sunday, I dug out my paper journal. Once upon a time, I journalled regularly. My favorite journal was this gorgeous leather one from Crane's with pages that felt like...fresh mozzarella. Soft and slippery and almost squishy. Now my current journal is this drab, brown, cloth-covered, hardback book that I bought at Ikea for like $2. I've had it since January 2008 and there's not more than a handful of entries in it (3 in all of 2009). When I stopped journalling regularly, it was because I was writing simply out of habit. It was like brushing my teeth - if I didn't do it before I went to bed, I felt guilty! My entries had become robotic, nothing more than a daily account of what I had done that day. So I made the conscious decision to stop journalling daily and just write when I really felt like writing, which usually meant when I was feeling particularly emotional.
On Sunday, I pulled out my journal for exactly the opposite reason - I was feeling rather unemotional. By all accounts I had a very eventful weekend, one that may eventually inspire a flurry of posts here. But when I sat down at my computer, nothing came to me. I kept starting and stopping. Everything I typed, I went back and deleted. It was like thought after unrelated thought kept floating through my head. It was almost like I felt indifferent to what had transpired over the weekend. But I thought, surely, surely, there was no way I could feel nothing about it. Surely it had to be because there were just too many feelings and too many thoughts that I couldn't pin even one down.
On Sunday, I pulled out my journal for exactly the opposite reason - I was feeling rather unemotional. By all accounts I had a very eventful weekend, one that may eventually inspire a flurry of posts here. But when I sat down at my computer, nothing came to me. I kept starting and stopping. Everything I typed, I went back and deleted. It was like thought after unrelated thought kept floating through my head. It was almost like I felt indifferent to what had transpired over the weekend. But I thought, surely, surely, there was no way I could feel nothing about it. Surely it had to be because there were just too many feelings and too many thoughts that I couldn't pin even one down.
So I journalled. I put pen to paper. There was no going back and deleting or cutting and pasting or moving things around or coming up with better ways to phrase things. It was just one big purple-ink jumble of my unfiltered thoughts. I hoped that writing everything out in a frazzled stream of consciousness would help me to sort of what I was feeling. But it didn't. I'm still puzzled by my lack of any strong reaction to this events of this past weekend. But maybe that's just it. Maybe I don't need a "takeaway" from this weekend. Maybe there's nothing to figure out. Maybe it's okay to shrug and just move on.
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