Dear Diaries,
Dear Diaries,
I’ve spilled my mind’s questions and my heart’s longings on your pages since I was ten, filling over a hundred notebooks of various sizes, shapes, and colors. After all these years, it’s time to convey how much you mean to me.
As a pre-teen and teenager, I locked you up tight—my four-inch leather Dairy—with a tiny golden key and tucked you out of sight beneath Seventeen magazines and a couple of Nancy Drew mysteries in the cubby of my nightstand.
“What if someone were to read these words meant only for me?”
Today, my collection of journals parades across two bookshelves in my studio. No longer hidden away, you gladly await being skimmed through or poured over, reminding me of yesteryears’ highlights. There were the births of our babies and my choral music path unfolding. Losses of loved ones so painful I doubted I could ever go on. Page after page of ideas, wishes, worries, and dreams; you hold them for me.
Wherever I go, I carry you with me in the form of small purse journals. Whenever the urge to write something occurs, I pull you out of my purse or tote bag with a favorite pen. We capture the colors of the sunset from our vantage point on a ridge looking west on a neighborhood walk or snatch bits of intriguing conversation from the people at the next table at The Pannikin, our favorite coffee shop.
Entering my thoughts on the page is easy. The magic happens later as you decipher my jotting. How do you figure out what I need to know from the scribbles I leave on your pages? Meaning is revealed to me as I reread, sometimes many years after the original entry. You unveil these life treasures to me over and over. Year after year.
Sometimes, I pick you up and carry you to journal writing sessions, where we join other writers holding their diaries. An even greater power pulses through the room as we write and read together. Spellbound, everyone nods, grinning as you and your companions of notebooks prove that old adage that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Diaries on our laps, pens in hands, the room swirls with the sound of one voice after another reading aloud from our diaries. We hear our own emotions expressed via the words of others. Someone might shed a tear; there could be a gasp, a giggle, or twenty belly laughs at once as the stories pour forth. The room is alive with energy, as though pages and voices are floating above us, chanting questions, answers, sorrows, and joys.
Wherever I find myself: in my comfy chair at home, at a coffee shop, on an airplane, or seated on a bench atop a cliff, gazing down at the ocean, my pen fills your pages. You never fail to take my scattered thoughts and tidy them up for me to better understand what I crave to know.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Dear Diary,
Sally
