Speaking To Your Own Soul: A Writer's Journal

When I was about thirteen, a friend asked to see my journal, and I asked:  "Which one?"  I had, at the time, probably filled about a dozen of them.  It wasn't long after that day that I destroyed all those journals, burning them in a burn barrel out behind our home.  Like most teens, I went through a stage when I was mortified at the thought that anyone - anyone in the world - might find them and read them.  So they burned.

I didn't keep journals for some years after that, but then, as a young mother, I began again - and, once again, a few years later, destroyed all of them but a few.  And, began again.  I now have a shelf of my old journals, and from time to time, think of getting rid of them - but, these days, that's more because I'm tired of moving cardboard boxes filled with them every time my gypsy-soul decides it's time to decamp and go live somewhere else.

But I don't write in them anymore.  Haven't for some years.  A few years back, I went with World Teach on a program to go teach in Africa for one academic term.  While there, I made many friends - all of them much younger than I.  They wanted me to get on Facebook, so that we could stay in touch easily.  At first, I resisted, but I loved these people (you know who you are) and wanted to keep them in my life.  So, I signed up for Facebook, and got used to the once, twice, eight times a day posts.  Then followed Twitter, Tumblr, and more.  I posted musings, observations, overheard conversations.  And my journals gathered dust on the shelf.

Then, some events in the household this week caused me to get out a journal again.  I got out my old leather-bound Moleskin and went to the deck with my favorite writing pen (I still often compose my fiction by hand).  There were  some things I just couldn't muse about online, but as my late sister used to tell me:  "Judy, you think on paper."

I sat, I jotted a few lines, I sipped tea, and jotted some more. Before long, words of a type I hadn't written in some time flowed from my pen to the soft paper.  I found my brain going to places I hadn't been for a while. Reflection, cogitation, consideration.  My voice as it writes only for me, just speaking to my own soul, was and is a very different voice than my public voice, and certainly different than my online voice.  And I found I'd missed it.

This isn't about the evils of social media.  I actually love them, and as something of an anti-Luddite, I frequently defend them - I think any opportunity for human connection is a good thing.  This isn't about that.

I didn't solve all the problems I had that day.  But I did solve a problem that I did not know that I had.  A need to, quietly and internally, just for my own eyes and no others, give voice to my soul.  One way that my soul speaks is through my fiction, but in that form of writing my soul is a conduit for stories, and they're intended, from the first scratch of the pen, to be share.  The soul also needs to speak to and for only itself to be fully engaged.  Meditation gets there sometimes, but, for a writer, I think the most direct route is that bound book, kept with your dearest possessions, which sits there, just waiting to be your voice.  Just yours.