On Buying a New Journal
And thinking about my hands more than I ever have before.
I went to a journaling club on Saturday afternoon because I am trying to be brave and do new things. It was formed because of Suleika Jaouad’s book, The Book of Alchemy. The Book of Alchemy is about 100 short essays from various contributors all including a prompt at the end.
I had bought this book many months ago, but didn’t crack it open until the club and I was pleasantly surprised at what I found inside.
How the journaling club worked (and Suleika has a guide on her Substack if you’re interested in starting your own) is that we introduced ourselves and shared what our relationship to journaling was. I am a lifelong journaler, but I realized I only ever journal when something was going wrong. This realization was amplified when someone else said that they do the same thing and that they didn’t want their journal to be a reflection of all the bad times they had in their 20s.
I put that thought aside for a moment and focused on the prompt they gave us: “Write about your relationship to your hands. How have you thought of them, used them, or even abused them over the years? What about now?”
I launched into several thoughts about my hands, including how everyone has always called them small, learning that they are the same size as my partner’s 7 year old son’s hands, how they could barely stretch an octave when I was learning how to play piano, and how my pinky would never sit right when I was bowing my violin. I was fascinated by how many opinions I had about my hands. How many cool things they’ve done and how much I’ve beaten them up - I think I’m at about 5 cortisone injections across the two? Yikes.
It was so refreshing to have something to write about with purpose, other than ranting about whatever was on my mind which is USUALLY how I journal.
Because as I started to turn back the pages in my journal, one that I’ve written in since 2018, I realized that it was pretty much ALL rants. There are dozens of pages about failed relationships, boys I crushed on for too long, problems with friends. There were almost NO good entries about things I was happy about???
My 20s were a piece of work, but surely there must have been some good times. I felt like I owed it to that fellow participant to tell her that hey - uh, yeah! Don’t do what I did! Focus on the good times! I started feeling icky about it all. So, after journaling club I immediately bought a new journal. I upgraded to a fancy Leuchtturm 1917 instead of the $5.99 spiral bound notebook I bought at Home Goods. I wanted to start out fresh and turn a positive new leaf, instead of dwelling in the negativity of my past. It seemed to me like the only way to do that was to literally start with a new page.
Who knows, maybe I’ll find all the letters I wrote to exes because I was trying to forget them or they hurt my feelings funny. Ugh, nope. It’s still cringe.
Do you journal? Do you want to? If you’re local to the Twin Cities, feel free to join me at the next club.
Until next Tuesday. <3 Martha