Someone Keeps Buying Them.

I love going to Barnes and looking at the journals, especially when I find one I've never seen before. It's a thrill even if it's not a journal I would buy. It means people are still buying jounals and gifts to themselves or others.

And that means that to some degree, people still believe in the power of scribbling. They must believe that a person can heal inner damage, develop a writing talent, spill secrets, or just pass the time pleasurably in a book waiting for the person's words. Something pretty and sturdy and completely one's own--what object could be more soothing?

I used to think I'd never be able to fill up a journal. Now I've done it 163 times over the last 17 years. Filling a whole notebook or journal with one's words (and drawings, quotations, or anything) is such an empowering experience. It always feels awesome, whether it takes two weeks (as it did when I was a manic 16-year-old) or two years.

Journaling has kept me tethered to Earth. It has helped me when my hold on reality was weak. It has calmed my anxiety and accepted my grief again and again. It changes the way I look at and experience the world because I'm thinking of how I'll describe it in my journal, which will enhance my delight or soften my fear. Journaling is one of the elements that may have kept me alive this long. And I've held onto it instead of pushing it away. It is one of the strongest, purest loves of my life.

Someone knows some of this intuitively (or maybe from experience) and wants that help (and that joy!) for himself or herself or for someone else who just might be open to a journaling life.

So I'll keep going to the journal section, greeting the journals I'll never want to buy, the ones I'll never think I can afford, and the twins of ones I've already written in or that are waiting in a green polka-dot box under my bed. And sometimes, I see something new and feel glad that whether or not people are scribbling, they are seeing a journal's potential and buying it as a gift or as a gift to themselves.