The Importance of Journaling

Things have been different for the past month or so. I feel like I am operating on a different level. Not that I'm more functional, because I know what that means to other people and I haven't been more of that. There is more depth and spirituality to life. I haven't been manic. Thoughtiness has been normal.

I went to the holistic fair a couple weeks ago, very enlightening. I was going to write a blog about that but never actually did. I was told, among other things, I needed to approach literary agents in person. Which means go to writer's conferences.

Yesterday I went grocery shopping and my mentor suggested we buy a bookshelf for me, so we did. Once home I took it out of the box and put it together, which just meant folding it apart so it stood up. I got excited and immediately found a place in my dining room to put it, but one of my candle holders on the top shelf and started filling it with books. Later I noticed that in the box there were also little metal thingies that were supposed to go in somewhere. Oh well, it stands, I don't think it's going to fall or anything. This is an unimportant side note.

I went into my room, got the large plastic storage container which contains all my books and started placing them on the shelf. I was thinking about how you can tell so much about a person by looking at the books on their bookshelf. Each book represents a part of myself. Of course, some books are just books that other people gave to me and insisted that I read, so I started reading and got about half way through and lost interest. That's why a lot of the books have bookmarks. But anyway, in a way, each book represents a part of myself. And it's sitting there, right in my front room for anyone who visits to look at. Hardly any people actually come into my apartment.

So I got to the bottom, and I was fresh out of books, and the shelf wasn't full, so I put a red candle in the middle of the second shelf to hold the books in place. And I was looking in the box. There were some random CDs, the nutrition software from my one nutrition class, some almost used up sudoku books, and a magazine or two. And then there was a folded up piece of computer paper. I thought: "Oh God... it's one of those old journal things I used to do when I was bored at Hudlow (the lamest Innercept campus). Oh God I don't want to read that." But, of course, I did anyway.

This was one of those wow moments. I hadn't dated this one but I could tell from the stuff I said in it that it was from early November 2008. Back when I had developed a minor case of delusions about my previous delusions. On the paper, I didn't talk about what I actually believed. I talked about a dream I had, which I don't remember having, in which a certain unnamed person in my life told me something. And it brought up an issue in my life, and I was just struck by how important it still is in how big of an impact it had and how it just proves to me beyond any thread of a doubt in my own mind that there is more to the world than the material and that certain things happen on purpose and that anyone who says otherwise is just wrong, wrong, wrong. And I know that me saying I know this doesn't mean anything, because you can be absolutely sure of something and that doesn't mean it's true. But still, I was struck by this thought.

I described what I was going to do next and what my biggest fear was about it. Reading it, I thought, "Boy, I remember how that panned out!" Yes, my biggest fear came true and it was not pretty and it was something I don't want to think about. An ugly situation. When I wrote on this piece of paper, I had no idea.

I described something my therapist said to me about what would happen that absolutely did not happen. Ha.

More than anything, I wasn't struck by how different I was back then, but more by how some things just absolutely do not change. That about sums up how I feel about that.

From this experience I realized that journaling is something that is absolutely important and that everyone needs to do right now. Write down as much stuff as possible about what's going on in your life. Just write everything down, absolutely everything because most things slip away from you at an alarming rate and there is no telling what you will remember from now. And looking back on what you wrote from years back, you will learn things about yourself.

So, from now on, I'll be taking some of my writing offline. Though, I will still blog, but there are some things that aren't right to say on the internet.