The first hour of work every day, I mostly spend thinking. I’m effectively by myself in the office – people pass through, but the people I work closely with every day start arriving around 8:15 or so. So I sit, and wait for the phone to ring, and think.
The past couple of days I’ve been thinking about the journal. Where it’s going. If it’s going. My original goal was to explore my own mind. To write about my life in hopes of better understanding my life, and myself. For awhile, I succeeded. The format of the page and the knowledge of the readers provided a spur and a context I couldn’t reach on paper.
The urge hasn’t gone. I still enjoy the writing. Fitting my words into my design, “publishing” it, still gives it a completeness I don’t find anywhere else. But I find the same thing happening lately tha tmade me quit before. That sense of writing myself into a box. Things I can’t say outweighing things I can.
The comments and email I got on my last entry made me reconsider writing it. So many people had a problem with me writing about an issue I had with my boyfriend that even his complete lack of any problem with it didn’t totally erase my concern that I’d violated some kind of mystical journalling code of ethics. And still I’m wondering – was the issue that I was writing about it, or that he was reading it? Would anyone have even paused if I’d been writing into the void? Part of me, the rational part, I’m hoping, thinks that if he doesn’t have a problem with it, all the commentary in the world shouldn’t matter. But part of me still feels like I crossed a line, and it’s leaving me creatively stuck.
Let’s say all of my friends read this, and my family reads this. Which they do. So I can say good things about all of them, of which there are plenty, but the bad stuff gets censored? does this provide anything like an accurate picture of my life or my relationships? What does it say about the honesty of my feelings for them if I must edit them or my feelings about them?
I’m not talking about being nice to them and then getting online and slamming the fuck out of them for the perverse joy of web surfers, here. I’m talking about being as honest here as I am with them on a daily basis. It’s just as important that i write about them with the same reason and respect that I treat them with in my life. But to sugarcoat them or my relationships with them here seems not only to be an insult to them, but false to me. And that’s the one thing I absolutely refuse to ever let this journal be.
So this all leaves me two options. 1) Don’t write about them at all. 2) Trust them and myself to let the writing be what it is – an expression of some of my thoughts. One that does not and will not replace my real life communications with them.
Option 1 is one that many journallers use, but it’s not viable for me. If I can’t write about my relationships, and I don’t write about my job, what does that leave? A detailed book report and movie review? The people in my life are what gives it its real meaning. To leave them out leaves the journal pretty meaningless too.
So I’m going to continue to use option 2, and this will be my last explanation for it. I’ve chosen to fill my life with the most honest and well-balanced people I’ve ever met. It would hardly be true to my opinion of them for me to doubt for one second that the moment it becomes a problem, I’ll know about it. And until it is a problem with them, it’s not a problem.