I've had other journals.
There was a slender spiral-bound notebook that I kept hidden between my mattress and box springs when I was fifteen. Inside Bridgett Jones-like snippets concentrated on two Michaels out to capture my heart and break it to pieces.
Laine bought me a proper journal for my eighteenth birthday, wrapped in a tan and periwinkle plaid cloth. Inside the front cover she inscribed, "This book is for all your hopes, dreams, and aspirations." My undisciplined writing habit helped it last a few months into my sophomore year in college, ending abruptly on the verge of what I look back on now as my first love affair.
More cloth bound volumes followed and I filled them with the kind of secrets that I thought no one would understand. And then after he read them, I found my trust in those pages was broken. The years I spent building a freedom from self-censorship crumbled in the course of one evening's conversation.
Journals turned into story notebooks. Single lines. Ideas. Sometimes just a word or two on a page. I invested in fancy sketch books and hand-painted spiral-bound notebooks, but I couldn't afford to write anything concrete. Years escaped under a vague cloak of joy or darkness without a detail left to savor. I spent years painting bold colors without an ounce of texture.
In those years, life itself seemed very abstract. I liked to dwell in big themes rather than small pleasures. Critic after critic told me to get myself grounded, to start writing about the tangible world around me. It came slowly at first: drumming hands on the headboard of my bed and the way my finger fit perfectly into the reel of a cassette tape. I had to re-teach myself to look at the event rather than the pattern. And when I succeeded, I suddenly realized there was magic all around.
And it just seemed natural to write it down.
And whirlygirl was born.
Whirlygirl is a collection of moments: sometimes frozen sections of honesty and other times wild fictions of perspective. They are usually silly and pointless and every so often heartfelt and poignant. But mostly, whirlygirl is an exercise in perceiving a breathing world; an attempt to capture the resonant moments that float into my life and color my subconscious.
I'm reminded of this Coupland quote from Life After God:
"I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments- and if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection- certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn't even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real- this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives."
It's been a year.
What patterns have you seen emerge?