AINE GREANEY
This morning, I ate some oatmeal, drank some coffee and
grandly wrote, “Collected poems, rhymes and thoughts.”
penned the last page of my personal journal. I flip back to
Now, when I re-read those hand-written pages, I see
the first page: June 30, 2015. Inside this bound book are
just how wrong I was to believe that our past has ever
almost eight months’ worth of thoughts, uncertainties,
really passed. I am shocked at how well those “assorted
musings and arguments.
rhymes” still describe the middle-aged me.
I don’t write in my journal every day, but on those
For example, here’s one of those entries that I
weekday mornings when I do, when I set the alarm to
remember writing as I sat propped against the pillows in
get up extra early, reflective writing makes the rest of my
my twin bed in my parents’ house:
working day happier. On the weekends, journaling acts as my transition from working me to creative me—and
My books stand orderly on the shelf
believe me when I tell you that the latter is the more
Masks for that hidden self
authentic version. In fact, journaling has taught me this:
Hoping they can quench the flame
The shorter the distance between our public and private
Of numberless passions with no name.
selves, the happier we are. Stephen King may have been
referring to an entirely different type or genre of writing,
I talk and talk; I make my stance
but he was really on to something when he declared that
‘You’re such good company,’ he said.
writing is about “getting happy.”
But what would he say if, perchance
I started keeping a journal in my teenage years while
He saw me sobbing in my bed?
I was attending a small-town convent day school in my native Ireland. Some days, I can still shut my eyes and
I find it comforting to read this unchanged part of me,
see myself back there, still dressed in my navy-blue
this struggle between the private and public self. I like
school uniform, sitting inside my bedroom window, my
that we have certain personality traits that are in-born or
geography and math texts pushed aside as I scribbled in
immutable, and that there is, at all of our cores, a perpet-
an old composition notebook.
ual and lifelong mystery.
We were the first generation to benefit from a 1967
In the basement of my house in Massachusetts, I
law that granted free, secondary-level (high school)
keep boxes of my completed journals, each one chroni-
education to every child in the Irish nation. So I was
cling six to twelve months over the course of my twen-
supposed to be grateful for that school uniform and
ty-nine years living here. My arrival day at JFK Airport,
those textbooks that had been denied my mother and my
New York. That hot, AugustSunday when my American
grandmother. I was grateful. Still, I recall those school
husband and I said, “I do” before a town judge. The day
days and nights as being full of square-peg-round-hole
an editor wrote to say she was going to publish my first
malaise and anxiety. In public, I sang with the choir in
short story. I remember these. But, if it weren’t for those
the school assembly room. In private, I wanted, desper-
journals, many or most of the less auspicious occasions,
ately, to raise my own, individual voice. Journaling was
the ordinary mornings or afternoons, would be gone
the only place where this was possible.
from memory recall. For example, in the journal I just
However, when I emigrated to America at age twen-
completed, on August 18, 2015, I wrote that “I am here
ty-four, I abandoned all but one of those notebooks. I
alone, finally, and the internet has made me vain and
think I believed that, in my bright, new country, in a
distracted, and these two things (vain and distracted) are
nation founded on the notion of deleted pasts and new
very connected.” I cannot remember feeling that—not
beginnings, that that melancholy, soul-searching me was
without re-reading my own handwriting on that page.
best left behind, left where it belonged. I did bring one hard-cover notebook into which I had
Without all of these hand-written journal pages, how much of the past two seasons would I actually remem-
transcribed some of those writings from my late teens
ber? How well could I evoke the sounds or feelings or
and early 20s. In the flyleaf of this little red notebook, I
atmosphere of one ordinary hour or afternoon in July
or August or September? What summertime walks did I take? When did the cherry blossoms drop their pink? When did the marsh grasses near my house turn dry and brown with summer heat? Now that our garden is under snow, I find it hard to close my eyes and re-see that garden when it was lush and colorful with summer perennials. Some days, I feel as if I am on a Japanese bullet train ride through a fast-disappearing landscape, where, by the time I sit up and look out the window, everything is already gliding out of eye view. Then there are those days when I’m driving home from work, my head still buzzing with deadlines or with snippets of workplace conversations, and I look out my car windshield at the roadside pine trees, a flock of geese flying south through the paling sky and I think, This evening, this moment in time will never come again. So I’d better shush my mind to look---really look--around me. How many of these afternoons are left in my life? I don’t know. None of us do. Morbid? I don’t think so. These moments of mindfulness are how we hit the pause button, how we behold our own joy. When we write down those moments, when we record them in a journal, we are creating the narrative—the only half-way reliable narrative—of our precious and finite days. Henry David Thoreau said that he traded his comfortable town home for a rustic woodland cabin because he wished to live deliberately. At least in the abstract, some of us covet this concept of unplugging and retreating from our hectic and digitized lives. Who wouldn’t like to slow down time so we can feel the heft and length of each passing hour? But nowadays, how many of us would adapt this as a permanent and year-round lifestyle choice? The woodland WiFi and cell phone connections would be spotty at best. And, as someone who grew up in a thatch-roof farmhouse without indoor plumbing or central heating, the discomforts and inconveniences of that bare-bones cabin life would, sooner or later, override the joy or mindfulness.
Without these journals, without this writing, most of the past seven months would be gone. This morning I closed my completed journal and crossed to my studio bookshelves to stash it there until, during one of my sudden and always overdue cleanouts, it will end up with all the others in those basement boxes. I know there will come a future day when I will go to the basement to search through the shelves for an old photo or a lost gadget and the journal box will call to me, as it has before. I will open today’s completed journal at a random page and sit there under the basement’s Florescent strip light in the company of my previous self, reliving a day from 2015. In all my past journals, I see recurring themes: the yearning for solitude; the immigrant’s search for an existential home; and my almost lifelong struggle and vacillation between my public and private personae (as in the 1983 piece above). When I read them, I’m also struck by how prophetic some of my past writings turn out to be. It seems, in retrospect, that the writing knew much more than I did. Too often, I see that I should have listened to or acted upon my own observations. Today, I select a new book to set on my desk underneath the east-facing window of my writer’s studio. The new blank journal sits here, empty and waiting for tomorrow.
Originally published online at Handwritten on February 19, 2016.