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| Decades of my journals |
My journals are a mess - and they should be. Decades of journals in notebooks bound and ring-bound, loose-leaf and cloth-covered. The pages are a mess, writing going sideways and in a circle, in different colors, interrupted with pictures and arrows and notes and even the occasional grocery list.
And not just the pages are a mess. In any given volume, entries may begin in 1997 and then break off, taking up again on the very next page in 2004. It isn't that I didn't write in my journals for those seven years - it's that suddenly, that particular volume didn't feel right to me, and I'd either switch to one of the others that still had empty pages, or start up a new one. Some volumes have entries from more than nine different years. I switched because the heft of the book didn't feel right - it didn't feel right when I ran my hand over the cover, or the paper wasn't smooth enough or rough enough for how I was feeling at that time. Or just because I wanted a change.
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Handwriting changes!
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As a consequence, they are, as the kids used to say, a hot mess. As humans, we do seem to have a need to organize things, and over the years, I've tried. A few times, I sat down thinking I'd catalog what years were in which volumes. Gave that up after two or three tries. Once I thought the way was to type up each year in a separate computer file - that lasted even less time. To try to find anything specific, or even the entries from a certain year, is, well, one very big task. And still I continue to change from journal to journal as the mood strikes me. Even my handwriting has changed over the years, sometimes from journal to journal. I can't predict what I may find (or be able to read) when I pick up any individual volume. And that is just as it should be.
These journals should not be a model of organization or chronology or anything measurable or quantifiable. Peter Elbow once said that writing was a process of making a mess and then
cleaning it up. The "mess" is the wonderful pile of ideas, brainstorms, anecdotes, sketches, and dreams that suddenly fall together to make a story. The "cleaning it up" is the construction of that story from the mess of thoughts that led you there.
But we humans do have a tendency to want order. This past week, I've been working on a piece about grief. In doing that, I couldn't help but think of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief, and looked those up. Reading about them, it struck me that there were similarities to the stages of the writing process put forward by many theorists, and also to the stages of cognitive development I studied so hard as I was preparing to become a teacher. And all of those have one more thing in common with the "stages" of the writing process: they aren't true. They don't really work that way. In her later years, Ross regretted ever having formulated the stages, because counselors were trying to force people into the model. "I'm so much more than those five stages," she said in her last years. "And so are you." Piaget admitted not all learners go through the stages of his model, and not all go through them in order. The stages of the writing process work best when, as suggested by philosopher/educator Paulo Freire, they are taken to be "recursive," to loop through and repeat different "stages" as needed by the individual.
Life is messy, learning is messy, writing is messy. In the beauty of that mess, as we trust it and immerse in it, as we feel it and touch it and let us carry it where it will, there's growth, and learning, and healing. One of the graduate school workshops I remember well from the cohort who all worked with my adviser, was the challenge, as we wrote under her guidance in workshop, to incorporate random elements she tossed at us - to learn to trust the random. So I pick up a journal from time to time, turn to a page, and think what those words are saying to the me of now. And I start a new journal (or switch) whenever I damn well please.
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