On being a writer with nothing to say and the intersection of journaling
The subtle art of childhood trauma meets a rambling substack entry
When I was a little kid I used to use spiral notebooks as journals. Blue ones, yellow ones, cheap ones, Five Star ones with built in cardboard folder pockets, shiny plastic coveted ones with brightly colored Lisa Frank designs. I was rabid about writing in them, to the point where I would index each notebook and include a table of contents with guidebooks to codes I’d created that cross referenced other notebooks to confuse people if they found them. (But who was looking for them?)
I could feel in my intuition that my excitement for journaling was not like other kids. My friends weren’t like this, they didn’t fill up notebooks with scrawl, they didn’t daydream of pages written to completion. They didn’t secretly wish they had a room filled up with journals ala Mr. Belvidere. (Surely, in other places some kids did, but not in the places where I was.) It was weird. I was weird. And overly earnest. And inherently, I felt shame about this.
I even went so far as to show my journals indifference sometimes, forcing myself to take off days from writing because I “cared too much” about something that even I could recognized on some child-like level as functionally useless and dangerously vulnerable in a capitalist society.
School had taught me well.
Still, to me, journaling was like a fountain that had been flipped on and my brain was a never ending flow of words. Can you even fucking fathom it? Having gone an entire week without writing a single fucking sentence, thirty-nine year old me…cannot.
And to be clear, the words I produced as a kid weren’t good words. I wasn’t some kind of prodigy, I wasn’t the fucking Mozart of journal writing.
I just hadn’t yet been completely plagued and closed-off by self doubt and perfectionism. I didn’t know to shut myself up out of fear of embarrassment or shame. I hadn’t fully learned that my opinions weren’t wanted or valued. That I should be quiet and let other people (boys, adults, authority figures) speak louder and over me. Although, I would soon learn all of this very well. I would soon become an expert at the feminine art of shutting the fuck up. Still, I maintained, for at least a few years, a nomimal level of creative freedom. It’s a time in my life I wish I could revisit in some capacity other than memory.
But that’s not possible, and I have no idea what’s happened to those journals. I cut off contact with my parents at 22, escaping their house late at night in a flurry of tears with nothing but the clothes on my back, abandoning years or personal writing to the decomposition of time in their moldy Midwest basement. Maybe they’ve been thrown away. Maybe they’ve been lovingly persevered (lol, never). Maybe they’ve been ripped and torn through and analyzed and mocked, betraying my childhood privacy. Maybe. Maybe.
The only thing I have left of them is flashes of memory. Memories of a time when the words were easy as jello, when they came out without the annoying red-light green-light game my brain plays now. When they came out as if somewhere, someone was watching—like the gods from Clash of the Titans, a movie I really loved as a kid—and that those gods thought that I, an eight year old, was the most talented and beloved writer in the world.
Funny how time can both change you to your core but also keep you exactly and fundamentally the same. Because who’s reading now other than the chorus of Greek Gods in my head?
When I was a kid, no one ever had to teach me how to journal. It wasn’t like it is now with workshops and classes and coaches showing us how to spell out the already swirling magic bubbling in our cauldrons.
I instinctively knew what to do because that’s how a lot of kids are. Just like how a male sea-horse knows how to care for its hundreds of babies. Or like how a colt knows how to stand out of the womb even though it’s hooves are still gelationous and disgusting.
Somewhere along the way, the flexible rubber of my brain hardened into a brittle band, a protective but counterprodoctuve shell covering my inside sensitive self. And instead of writing with total abandon, I did nothing at all. I filled my time with other things: work, drinking, friends, relationships. Sometimes those things were good, sometimes they weren’t. But the writing was lost. Or so I thought.
It took years to come back to myself again. Years to pick up a proverbial pen and dare to write. It took years of self doubt and self loathing and struggle and a risk-it-all attitude of sharing my shitty first drafts with strangers. Which certainly, is not every person’s relationship with writing, but it was with mine.
Until, I find myself here today. Writing again, in yet another journal.