Monday, March 19, 2012

story of my life


i finally sharpened my box of colored pencils i bought over 3 years ago and took them out for a test run!  i'm a little disappointed that my coloring skills have improved very little since my first grade days.  but fortunately i have the rest of my journal to color and will hopefully progress into something more artful  :D

a couple days ago i read this blog post about journaling and one point really inspired me to consider my own journaling in a different perspective.  what would it be like for my future family to read my journals?  ever since i started my first journal freshman year in college, i've been maintaining one every year.  the contents range far and wide.  like my blog, i do much better writing things down to help sort out brain gunk.  my introvertivity relishes in these times at the end of the day when i'm unwinding a days worth of thought and introspection.  it's that weird moment when i realize i have no one to talk to at night and suddenly these words come alive and hang out with me until the scribbles fall off the pages and i fall asleep.  (yikes, i'm so strange..)

in my journal i try to untangle my thought processes - why i do things the way i do, why i feel a certain way.  i analyze my life situation and pose questions to myself and try to answer them by the end of the page.  i like to doodle and glue random things inside that would carry special significance to only me.  and i like to be meticulous about my handwriting cuz i think it makes my journals look cool.  i also like to be stomping mad or overzealously happy or pitifully sad inside each lined page.  because at the core of my pages of miniature handwriting lie my one-way conversations with god.  hopeless honesty that rarely meet the ears of any human being.

forever until now, i'd concluded that if anyone ever read through my journals, i'd have to kill him.  right away.  or i'd run away into the jungle.  but what if someone actually read my journals and i couldn't bear to break social norms and go through with murder..  what kind of person would a reader make me out to be?  while i don't write everything that goes on in this little life of mine, i generally gravitate towards the journal when i have especially high surges of emotions.  (when things are straight-line, i'm less likely to write.)  so the result is sUPEr emo-charged journaling.  despite this reflection of extreme high and lows, i guess i'd hope that someday, if my great grandchildren were reading about their greatgrandma bo, they'd somehow see how important it is to rely on god for courage and strength, for faith and patience in every facet of life.  to know that it's okay not to have everything figured out, but to seek to grow in him.  to know that god is good and real and necessary in a world that is so broken.  and finally, to see when i'm being stupid and crazies and learn from my mistakes.

with that, i no longer feel a need to kill anyone suspicious of having read my journals..  sort of.  it'd probably be better to let these books sit through a couple generations before pulling them out.  probably best after i've gone..  ;) hehe

the blog post also gives several interesting ideas for more extensive journaling that i'm curious to try out.  i'm also curious what you guys think about journaling.. or the kind of things you put inside your journals.  =]

5 comments:

  1. when i'm feeling down/sad or overjoyed, sometimes i have trouble coming up with my own words, so I steal words from the psalms, and they seem to eloquently spell out my thoughts by putting letters together. I used to (try to) compose songs in my journals.

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  2. is a journal different from a blog? i think nowadays, for me, they're the same. but maybe that's because i'm too lazy to maintain two separate things.

    actually now that i think about it... when i used to have both, the journal would just end up being kind of emo. i didn't really like going back and reading the journal, so i stopped and started my current MT blog as sort of a chronicle of happier days. that way when i'm an old man i could look back and think, wow at least i used to be cool... haha

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  3. wow. penalty of death for reading your journal. scary.

    There are particular phrases or key verses that trigger certain memories in my mind. I usually write these down in my journal/blog. for me, just reading that verse or phrase will be enough to bring back a particular event that I associate with it.

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  4. did you draw that? it's soo good :D!!!! um....i haven't journaled much since whenever. but it's usually a place for me to express my conversation with God, plain and clean :) it's also a place for me to write down whatever thought God's showing/teaching me or places to draw, doodle, or whatever pictures come to my mind that i need to record from my mind :)

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  5. awesomeee feedback :D i'm happy to know that i'm among fellow journalers

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