Journaling

It has dawned on me that my blog has become a creative journal. While I don't chit-chat very much about my "real life," there are little hints here and there. I'm actually a person remarkably free of emotional baggage, so I don't NEED a journal in the way I did when I was 15 and the world semeed like one big angst-ridden hell. :-)

However, the very exercise of writing nearly every day has opened a floodgate of creativity. And that's a good thing. When I was younger, I journaled nearly every day. Looking back, it's amazing how full of the longing to be a "real" writer was part of me.

When I go to speak with middle schoolers and high schoolers about being a novelist, I tell them "Write every day. Start a journal." It's a portal into your creative side.

I no longer need to look inward in the same way I did when I was a student, though. And I no longer have the energy to dissect my primary relationships. I have a keen eye for what works in my life and what's broken. I know what I can fix and what is going to be broken but tolerable for the rest of my life here on Earth. It's not that anything is beyond hope, but sometimes broken is the best you can hope for. For instance, there is one particularly horrid--and I feel comfortable using the word evil--person in my life. I have offered her forgiveness multiple times via email and handwritten letter because she happens to be blood-related to someone important to me. Each time she has been more vile in her response than the previous time. Broken. I don't even think a death bed would make her realize how truly awful a human she is. She will go to her next rebirth as a cockroach perhaps. BUT . . . here's the thing . . . there is, I assure you, a calmness about this for me. It is what it is.

So no, a journal isn't necesssary for me to analyze. So what does it do for a writer? This blog has made me think about process, fine-tuning my writing, and most of all, it has often made me look at inspiration. Creative spark. Divine blessings. It has made me look with wonder at the gift writing is in my life. At the way I take the real world I live in and spin it and skew it and create a fake world that is on-so-much more dramatic at times, or better, or has a happy ending. Humans get "stuck"--in their addictions, in their hatefulness. But characters get to change.

So in terms of creativity, I guess that's what this blog does. Fellow bloggers? Journalers? It seems like nearly every writer I know has written since they were small. Anyone who has journaled that long?