New Journal, Page 1

Okay, I'll admit I've been slacking off. I'm a Government Journalism major and (recently at least) I've been heavy on the "government" and light on the "journalism." How am I ever going to improve my writing skills if I don't actually write something?

I will be the first to admit that, as much as I love writing, most of my 'work' appears in my personal journal which sits on my nightstand, and which pages are filled with the ramblings of a girl who is trying to teach herself NOT to talk to herself out loud anymore.

I've been writing in a personal journal since I was about 12 years old. Maybe longer than that, even. I still have most of those books in a box in my garage, sharing space with yellowed love letters from crushes of my youth, and souvenirs of good times and bad since I was old enough to walk.

Some of those journal-books tell of teenage angst: who did or didn't ask me out; what my bipolar mother did to me THIS time; what I imagined the popular kids were doing at any given time (which was usually pretty fantastical since I was myself both unpopular and incredibly imaginative).

Some of those books tell of my marriage to a man I thought I knew; my pregnancies and the births of my children; the breakup of that marriage and the incredibly painful divorce and custody challenges that brought me to my knees and taught me how to stand on my own two feet again.

Somewhere in that box in my garage is the journal with the entry that begins, "He finally found me -and I didn't even know he was looking." The beginning of an extraordinary relationship with a man whose soul is the other half of my own and whose emotions I could feel from a distance, wherever I was. And now, my journal is a running "to do" list for the wedding, sprinkled with tidbits of my academic stress and insights into the changes my children are going through as they enter the teen years that I myself remember all too well.

A friend recently suggested that the story of the events of my life might be "epic," but I resist that suggestion. My story is just a string of stumbles and falls, choices and mistakes --things that happened to me and things that happened because of me. That's not epic. That's just life. There isn't anything earth-shattering in there, just a lot of tedious -and sometimes random and inexplicable- thoughts given to ink and paper.

My fiance asked me if, after I pass away, would I want my journals to be read by anyone? I hesitated to answer that. Those journals are very personal to me. In a large way, they ARE me. I wrote freely, as if I was alone... talking to myself. I didn't censor or edit a single word on a single page. In real life, (like everyone else on the planet) I DO censor myself. I DO edit my words, or at least I choose them very carefully when situations call for it. If anyone read my journals, it would be like letting them read my mind. No, my very SOUL.

I imagine anyone reading those journals would think I was plum crazy. An emotional whirlwind. A "tempest in a teapot," as my father used to call me. All this urgent energy pushing the envelope of a young girl's psyche and creating a frenetic interpretive dance of words, changing mood and tempo from moment to moment. There is little indication of the sane, stable, focused woman I am on the outside. Could anyone who knows and loves me still see me (or remember me, if I'm dead and gone) in the same way they did before they opened the covers of my journals?

I don't know that I'm willing to take that risk. Not even if I'm dead.

It's not so much that I believe in an afterlife where those loved ones will call me to the carpet for being the nut-job they recently discovered me to be (assuming they don't cross to another heavenly cloud when they see me coming...). But, then again, I'm creative enough to IMAGINE such an afterlife and, really, I don't want to spend eternity eating alone at the Unpopular Table in the Cafeteria of Heaven.

No, I think I'll hang on to the facade of normalcy that I've created on the outside and spare the world the fragile, uncertain, insecure Melissa that I keep inside... even if it means that my life's "epic" journalistic endeavors -as memorialized on the many pages of cloth covered, spiral bound journal-books- go with me to the grave.