The Importance Of My Keeping A Journal

It was in the late sixties I started keeping a journal.  It was a pivotal point in my life.  Forty years ago I knew my emotions were frozen.  I could not cry.  I did not know how I felt at any moment.  I was deeply depressed.

My journal was a start.  It gave me somewhere to go safely.  It was my only outlet (outside of sports) at the time.  My writings back then were not that good.  I poured out my depressed feelings.

Eventually some of my entries became poems and even got published.  That was the furthest thing from my mind when I started.

At some point years later I made an important shift:  instead of accenting the negative I started writing more and more about the positive in my life.

I never would have got there if I had not written first about all the things that were bothering me.

At some point I started recording the humorous things that happened around me.  It became another way to diffuse the “craziness” I saw.

I found out decades later I liked making people laugh at open mikes.  And I wrote more and more funny poems.

None of this would have not happened if I did not start journalling in the late sixties.  Now my blogs have almost replaced my journal.  Though entries in my journal still trickle in.