Journals

I have several dozen journals that I have collected over the years. They are in boxes and bags around my apartment, collecting dust. Some have writing on every page. Others are mostly blank, with less than half of the pages filled. I often will re-use these half filled books, with differences in months and years between the pages. I treat journals and candles the same way -- I buy way more than I use. Just when I think that the last thing I need is another candle/journal, I buy a new one.

I was going to recycle my old journals, get rid of them. They served their purpose, the end. I was talking to a friend who has been divorced for several years, and she said to keep those journals.

"They will remind you why you left," she said.

Divorce is the death of a relationship where both people live on. It is easy to look back with remorse and regret, especially when the other party so easier and happily has moved on. It is easy to look back at the good things, the highlights, the things I miss.

I don't want to be bitter and angry about my ex, and think he is evil. I want to hold the good and the bad. I have an easy time remembering the good things, the times he was kind and supportive. My mind remembers the good, whereas my journals have the bad, the struggle, the confusion. I wrote and wrote, hoping to find an answer of how to fix him, how to fix myself, how to break the cycle of our dysfunction, but none came.

Instead of disposing of my journals, I put them in storage. I dug through the ones to see which were full and which were blank. I came across some heart-breaking entries, easily found on the front page. I found one from September 2004, the day we moved to Seattle, packing up from the Midwest to move to the West Coast. I found the turquoise blue Moleskine from April 2019, with the meeting notes from when we were initiating the process to send Pedro to treatment. I remembered sitting in Kristin's office, ripping the plastic wrap off the journal. I remember her commenting that I was starting a new page, a new chapter.

This weekend, in the depths of some misery, I looked at the front page of the journal I was writing in. Filled in from December 2021, "Reasons for Divorce" was the heading. It was sparse, but it reminded me of the pain and struggle I was in at the time.