When you’re young, female, literate, and known among your friends and family as “a writer,” there is no better gift in the world that everybody can think to get you than a new journal. I got pink ones, black ones, red ones, leather ones, plastic ones, small ones, big ones, flowered ones, paisley ones, and ones with little padlocks and tiny keys. I got them for my birthday, for Christmas, for Easter and for Valentine’s Day. I got them in boxes, bags, stockings, and baskets. I got so many new journals that I never wanted to see another journal again as long as I lived.
I never thought I would regret my ready reply, when asked on those stuffy evenings I was thrown together with my numerous and silly distant relatives, to their pleas of, “And what is your favorite subject in school?” Their eyes always seemed to come out at me as they asked this, ready and twinkling with all the hopes of an adult who has used up all his chances and must rely on those of the youth; the future. “English,” I would say. “I like to write. Stories and poems,” I would add, with enough prompting. It was an answer that, in its first formulation, surprised me as much as it delighted them. In a sense, it was me realizing what I “do”, and what I would probably “be” at my core for the rest of my life. I never thought I would grow to regret this reputation as much as I did when I realized I had signed on for a steady flow of ugly journals that would continue indefinitely (the last one I got was on this past Christmas).
But when I hit my awkward stage–a phenomenon that occurred somewhere in between puberty and my infamous 7th grade “makeup phase”–a strange thing happened. I started to write in the journals. First, I preferred the ones with locks on them–after all, my pages-long ruminations on the gym teacher I had a crush on were much safer under the protection of a plastic padlock the size of a ping-pong ball. But later, when the plastic padlock broke one night while I was inserting the plastic key, and when I realized that I was the only one who cared about Mr. Giles’ nice green eyes, I started writing in whichever one from my collection most suited my mood and purpose. I would write private things in the pink ones, dramatic fiction in the red ones, and thoughtless things in the black ones. I used the obscenely flowery ones–the most loathsome–for scrap paper, and I used the unlined ones as sketchbooks.
But whatever I was writing, and whichever ugly journal I chose, I was writing. I was practicing what I knew I loved to do, but was not sure how to practice. I would sit wherever it was quiet and safe-feeling, in the oddest nooks of my house or backyard, and let my pen spill to “somebody” other than myself. And when I had run out of things to say about my latest crush or my stance on cats versus dogs, I usually felt very clear-headed and wonderful. When I would go back and read my writings later, I would experience an array of disgust, pride, amusement, confusion, and nostalgia. I would wonder who I had been imagining I was speaking to, how I had thought of that phrase or that imagery, and consider how I might produce the same writing under different circumstances. I began to peg those things as audience, tone, mood, style, and the bewildering process that is revision. In short, I learned how to write.
