Noooo ... Don't do it!

A beautiful journal for the ugliest year …

Audio version … rest your eyes, open your ears:

We’ve all been there—screaming at the screen as the actor heads toward certain disaster. The basement stairs. The dark alley. The obviously poisoned coffee. Our minds (and sometimes our mouths) are screaming: “NOOOOO… don’t do it!”

That was me this weekend, except I was screaming at myself across time.

I’ve kept some form of a journal for more than thirty-five years. On one of my dumber—and darker—days as a thirty-something, I dumped a dozen of them into a dumpster. Along with photos, letters, and all manner of ephemera from my teens and twenties.

The woman typing these words now is screaming, No. Don’t do it.

But real life doesn’t offer cinematic do-overs. No one grabbed me by the arm. No dramatic cutaway. Just the sound of years of my life hitting metal, the weight of them leaving my hands forever, because I was too afraid to face what had come before. In that moment, the mouth of the dumpster seemed like an appropriate resting place for everything I’d been up to that point.

Thankfully that was the last time I threw away my collection of journals.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been selecting at random and reading through journals from the last twenty years. Most recently, I opened one of my favorites I’ve ever owned. I remember the splurge clearly. I’ve never been precious about notebooks—spiral-bound has often done the job—but this one cost upwards of twenty-nine dollars at the time, which means I’d likely need to exchange a kidney to buy it today.

I was drawn to its design: a gorgeous replica of a Louis Comfort Tiffany piece, Autumn Vine. I remember loving its heft. The solidity. The quality of the paper. The hand-tied rope binding. A small leather tab with a magnet, keeping my words—and my life—safely held between hardbound covers.

What I couldn’t have known then was that this beautiful book would hold one of the ugliest years of my life.

The pages overflow with grief. Loss of self. Loss of home. Loss of the known. Loss of love. Loss of life.

But the journal doesn’t begin with loss.

It begins on an optimistic Sunday, January 1st:

“Here we go, New Year! … finished reading my journal from last year. It wasn’t necessarily a ‘bad’ year—but to even label a year one thing or another is to remove much of the mystery and unknowing that each day, each moment, each year offers…”

This morning—more than a decade removed, safe in the knowledge that I survived it, that the story turns out pretty okay—I still felt my heart race. My mind scrambled. Tears spilled as each turned page brought me closer to the first crack that would become the earthquake of that year.

Inside, the scream rose again: “NOOOO… don’t turn the page. It’s there—the loss, the hurt, the deceit, the death. Stay here. Stay on this page with the optimism. With the job I booked. The class I taught. The friends I hiked with. Just. Don’t. Turn. The. Page.”

But of course, I turned it.

Just as I did then—getting up each day during those terrible months and writing down what was happening.

Why do we do that? Why do some of us feel compelled to record our living while we’re still in it?

I think it’s because we find ways to witness ourselves because living, on its own, can feel too fragile to trust. Because memory is slippery. Because pain distorts time. Because joy, left undocumented, can disappear just as easily. Narrating our lives becomes a way of saying: I was here. This mattered. I survived this.

My way of witnessing has been pen and paper—journal after journal, year after year. Not to preserve a perfect story, but to leave myself a trail back. So that one day, I could sit safely on the other side of a terrible year and know—not guess—how far I’d come.

And more importantly, how much love had held me when I couldn’t hold myself.

The final entry of this beautiful journal, written at the end of that devastating year:

“…it is about closing a year with so much heartbreak that the tears have fully watered the seeds planted by those who care, love, and know me best.”

I turn the page now and feel the truth of that in my body.
Those seeds took. What those tears watered has grown.

Turn the page y’all, see where you’ve been and how far you’ve come.