Last week Gabriel graduated from high school!
I have a lot of emotions. Writing, as usual, helps, and so I’ve taken out my journal again. When Gabriel and Simone were babies and toddlers, I kept pretty good journals about what they were doing and how it was to be a mother of young kids.
As a young mother, I was both writing for myself in the moment and writing for my future self and the future self of my kids, who would look back on our writing.
Now when I read those early journals, we both are and are not the same person we were.
What is the self? In some ways, that is what writing is all about, at least for me: it’s an invitation and dialogue with the self, a way to explore what selfhood is, in its many aspects, and then, when we are ready, a way share that interior life with others.
But first, before we share, writing is about discovery. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say,” the novelist EM Forester famously quipped. And the best way to see what we say is to write it down.
So in this post I want to explore the benefits of keeping journals, what to write in a journal, and more.