Words are my constant
Last night, as I was going through my wind down process, I started looking through previous entries. I looked back at another planner, other items in the old digital archives. All that hoping and wishing, all the big ticket goals without a plan or with plans of words to write, lines of code to lay down, database schemas, little sketches of bookcases to build. None had staying power, none kept interest for more than a few weeks. This made me sad. Abandoned—dreams is the wrong word—hopes. I wonder if my planning is trying to force me into doing something that I’m not all that invested in. This sadness dissipated when I realized that what has stuck with me all these years—decades—is writing.
The earliest journal I’ve kept was a gift from my first “serious” relationship when I was sixteen. The journal has a picture of a cherubic angel, reminiscent of my Catholic upbringing, the first entry dated on my sixteenth birthday. The sentences and words are cramped and constrained, as if I was afraid of making myself known. So much questioning in those pages, break-ups and crushes, getting my driver’s license, angry diatribes directed toward my parents, the weekend spent training other students how to be peer counselors and mediators (and the innocent, wild nights of teenagers when all the workshops were over), the weekend with the Youth Congress (if memory serves me, that was the church group I was part of). There are the beginnings of the woman I am today in that journal, the first steps at adulthood. It has brought a smile to my face this morning.
That is the constant of my life. The words. I tend to write more when going through hardship or I am unsure of my direction, less so when things are smooth and easy. Rather than planners and linear steps, the words show me the patterns of thought, of my actions. They hold the wishes and dreams. Words, the free-form, loose ones, show me where to go. I have a few notebooks, maybe two year’s worth from after my divorce, where I am trying to find myself again. I’ve read through them previously; the haunting doubt of my worth as a partner, the realization that I was unhappy far longer than I admitted, the slow confidence that allowed me to heal and move to New York City for something I thought I was wholly unqualified for.
Writing has always told me who I am. It has pointed the way out and through. There are starts and stops, entries that end in mid-sentence, frustration electric in the words. Or the banality dripping from them. There was a period when I would rip the pages from my journal, afraid of the power of the words, as if throwing them out would expunge the demons they described, rip them from my body. That is my one tiny regret; how I wish I didn’t destroy the record of those thoughts. I am at peace with the woman that wrote them. I would have liked to meet her again. As Joan Didion has said, “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
Looking now at the words I am writing here in this notebook, I notice they are more loose, my strokes more sure. I’m relatively at peace with who I am today. I’m still improving (Lord knows I have a wicked temper, a gift from the Italian side of me) but I’m much more forgiving than past me ever was. I haven’t ripped out pages in years, decades probably. There were a few years where I didn’t write at all, after my ex admitted to reading my journals. I had been violated and the safety of the page shattered. Now, with C, that safety has been restored and I leave my journal in the living room, the kitchen, open on my desk without a passing thought. Truth be told, I doubt anyone would care much for my inane writings now.
Some words are just for me, hence the quiet period here on this site recently. These words are still in my notebook—notebook first, always—so future Nikkis can look back, share in the silliness, marvel at the grace, commiserate with the sorrow at all that is to come. So that I can remember, so that I can see the patterns, so I can find my way through. Words are my constant, words my savior, words my first true love.