Confession: tonight, the last thing I want to be doing is sitting with my eyes open in front of a computer screen. Unfortunately I have this health class assignment for the semester to write three times a week, among other things, and so I'm taking advantage of these rare extra couple of minutes to fulfill that "stress management goal". (Go ahead; be jealous of my easy homework!) It's actually quite strange that I'm not thinking of anything to write at the current moment because usually my brain thinks in quotes or concise narratives. Crazy, right? I don't really think it's that obscure - I've always been like this. I can recall times of making object lessons out of the skill it takes to walk on mud, not as mere ideas but as if I were writing them out eloquently. There have been many days when in anger I rant some sort of a letter to my offender, using my mental backspace button repeatedly. Oh, and let me not forget to mention the frustration of when my brain won't let me move on until I have perfected a "quote" that sums up my mood! I've grown to love thinking and responding to situations in such a way, but sometimes after refining a certain quote that stemmed off of an epiphany . . . I forget entirely what it was, and that is maddening! I recently went to BigLots in attempts to intercept this horrid cycle and bought myself a sort of journal to carry around. In reality it's a planner case (deep turquoise leather with gold stitching) that I stuck a smaller notebook into (animal planet picture of a monkey on it), but it functions. I try to keep it around me but often fail at such attempts. Whatever the case, I have written in it and therefore captured more thoughts than I would have without it - a few of which I will share here:
"We're not always going to be the Hero, but that doesn't mean we have to play Villain"
"It's like God is chipping away at my comfort zone walls with a hammer and chisel, it hurts a little but I don't react . . . so He comes in with dynamite and I fly unsuspectingly towards the outside world of emotion and honesty and humility."
"Where 'it's a long story' exists, raw fact can become extinct in translation."
"You know I'm in the room. That is, you would if you knew the sound of my voice. Maybe you don't - because it doesn't speak to you frequently. Perhaps because it's learned you don't care." . . . "You don't know my heart's priorities because you never ask, and if you do - you hear but never listen."
There are many other scribblings in that thing I call a journal - some are red and others blue or black. Not all of the notes are even writing related either; I jot down phone numbers, scheduling appointments, important websites or even things other people say. Sometimes they are written neatly with artistic flare but most are merely scribbled. Occasionally they drift sideways or contain thought outline arrows. But mainly - they are beautiful. Beautifully diverse, beautifully freeing for my sense of compartmentalizing life, beautifully mine. But just because I carry a journal around like this doesn't mean that I can sit down in the writing mood at any time, which is why tonight you were defaulted to my journal snip-its. Goodnight!
