A Shroud Of Words
This is the very first diary I ever kept, given to me by someone on my tenth birthday. It is unfortunate that it is peppered with fervent religious sentiments; this was kept during my very serious year of seeking God. I was attending a Born Again Christian church with my best friend until they told me I had to get baptised to keep coming, which my mom refused to let me do until I turned 18. At which point I realized how ridiculous it is to depend on being dipped in water in a symbolic "cleansing" in order for God to love his children. Shit, can you imagine if I refused to love my son if he didn't prove his love for me by doing the dishes, or eating a strip of leather.
I have never been so earnest, honest, and exposed as I am in this broken backed tome of painful childishness. The worst part is all that I am not saying. The spelling is pretty atrocious which makes it even more poignant. Would destroying this diary erase who I am? No. But would it free me to not remember just how awfully hard I tried, even back then, to find the love. The good. The happy. When I think of what was really going on in my life it makes me kind of sick to see how I believed that a diary isn't for telling the dark stuff but for finding the light. In a way it is, but as the years wore on I would find that it was through releasing the dark that the light could shine.
I have hundreds of notebooks, journals, sheets of typed writing, and it all records who I have been; they have preserved me more perfectly than a pool of amber could. They have come through fire (literally) and haunt me every single day. If anyone really wanted to know how I came through life, alive, how I got through years of mostly wanting to die, years of having a tortured mind, how I managed to come through the other side, it's all right here in this pile. And several others.Diaries become like your shadow self. Everyone has different diary styles: some tell all the nitty gritty mind numbing details of their every day life that historians will have orgasms over in another hundred years when we've all become a mystery; some write only what they feel is worth recording for posterity-important events for example-a very edited style of record; some write from their imaginations, letting fiction and fact mingle in a huge eternal question mark; some write completely honestly; some write only the dark stuff; and some use their diaries to find all the good stuff in the bad. I have done it all. What you record, no matter your journal writing style, is in some way absolutely true to some part of you and lives it's own life. They breath in the dark of your drawers and boxes, in the shadows where you have packed them away to mature.
I am a writer. I became a writer the day I started keeping that diary. I have been on this writing journey for twenty seven years and just might be the most prolific unpublished writer alive. I have spent more hours of my life writing than I have spent it doing anything else besides sleeping and working for wages. I have tried to cross a threshold with words that is still solid. It is this line I am unable to cross between fact and fiction. Whenever I try to make things up based on true experiences I am bound to the absolute honest truth because my conscious mind knows the truth is written. I can't unwrite what is written. Can the bible be unwritten? If you have been keeping a meticulous record of living, how can you unwrite it?
Why would one want to? Because I have put all of myself into those notebooks and journals and while those diaries live, there's a part of me trapped in them too. A part of me that needs to be released in order to rewrite some of the past. I need to be able to forget some of the things I felt as a teen, some of the rawness of being a powerless ten years old.
For years I have been wanting to burn them. Destroy them. I am one of those people who loves to read dead people's journals and letters that are published into books. I love that kind of intimacy with the past. With other people's pasts. I used to hang onto those journals because I thought "Here is an unedited view of what it's like to be a mentally ill youth trying to live. Won't that be great for someone to read in a hundred years? It's history that I'm littering the earth with. Proof. Proof."
Now I ask myself if I want everyone to know all the intimate details of my early life. Is that what I want to contribute? My writing, over the years, has become so much better. What I have to say now is so much more important than what I had to say then. I have always wanted to have a gift to give the world. Something really worthy to leave behind for others to gather courage from. I want that gift to be worthy.
All of those journals were like a safe cocoon I was spinning around myself for protection. A cocoon in which I could grow privately, out of the public view. It was like a nest high in the trees, full of magpie scraps of life shoved in the the crevices for warmth against a winter that lasted for many years. A bird has to leave its nest. A butterfly cannot live life in its cocoon or it will die. When the bird leaves the nest the nest slowly decays with disuse. Or it is borrowed by new birds. The nest is just a vehicle. Sometimes we find them shattered on the ground and pick them up with all the care and awe we save for the most delicious artifacts. Do butterflies come back to visit their discarded cocoons in a reverent display of nostalgia? They do not. Cocoons drift away in the wind.
You emerge from life. You do it in whatever way you need to, but all the shadows of past selves, all the ghosts we carry around only weigh us down. I emerged from my nest, but it's as though I have been carrying it around on my head for years. How ridiculous to see a bird cross the Atlantic with last spring's nest when it is headed for new trees, new meadows, and new adventures in which the old nest is nearly useless.
Why do we hang on? Do you think my first diary is something precious? Let me share an unedited passage with you which makes me sound like a hit man approaching my first job:
"Dear Diary, I had I good day today. I got my packet done. I want to find a secret garden of my own. it would be fun. I am getting rid of Kim Kay Keyser! but I don't really know how but I will figure it out."
Or how about this sweet gem of psychic content:
"Dear Diary, Today was Bad! Bad! Bad! Horrible! Horrible! Horrible! Sally got away! Our best bunny! Sally! our broun French Lop bunny rabbit!!! My mom and dad are arguing a bunch! It is so bad I ran up to my bedroom and cried and cried. I think they might get in divorce!!! I hope not! I pray God not. Amen."
I know you're curious to read one of my very early poems. On August 18 of (I think) 1980 I wrote this very deep poem called "Life is hard":
Life is hard sometimes,
work to be done,
children to watch,
races to be run,
bills to be filled,
pears to be chilled,
yes life is hard,
but you can make the best of it,
do what has to be done,
and there will always be time to sit,
yes it's something you've got to admit.
Alice of Future Girl has given me courage to do something with these old early diaries and journals of mine. I haven't yet been able to bring myself to burn them. I keep feeling like there's got to be a more poetic way to strip myself of this shroud of words. I need to fly. In this particularly lean point of time in my life I feel it would benefit me to shed the weights my spirit has been carrying. I need a lot of courage right now. So I'm going to make a wish box papered in those journals. And I will put them in my shop too. A box you can give to anyone needing to set themselves free, needing the courage to move forward, to make change, to rise from the ashes with a new set of wings.
Dammit. I can't say it without sounding amazingly cliched. So I will have to show you. I am going to go into my (now) set up studio and make the first one. Then I'll show you my little box of courage. Perhaps if I give other people little pieces of myself I will grow lighter. Perhaps others can take that piece of me to buoy themselves against a rough time.
I am a writer. I became a writer the day I started keeping that diary. I have been on this writing journey for twenty seven years and just might be the most prolific unpublished writer alive. I have spent more hours of my life writing than I have spent it doing anything else besides sleeping and working for wages. I have tried to cross a threshold with words that is still solid. It is this line I am unable to cross between fact and fiction. Whenever I try to make things up based on true experiences I am bound to the absolute honest truth because my conscious mind knows the truth is written. I can't unwrite what is written. Can the bible be unwritten? If you have been keeping a meticulous record of living, how can you unwrite it?
Why would one want to? Because I have put all of myself into those notebooks and journals and while those diaries live, there's a part of me trapped in them too. A part of me that needs to be released in order to rewrite some of the past. I need to be able to forget some of the things I felt as a teen, some of the rawness of being a powerless ten years old.
For years I have been wanting to burn them. Destroy them. I am one of those people who loves to read dead people's journals and letters that are published into books. I love that kind of intimacy with the past. With other people's pasts. I used to hang onto those journals because I thought "Here is an unedited view of what it's like to be a mentally ill youth trying to live. Won't that be great for someone to read in a hundred years? It's history that I'm littering the earth with. Proof. Proof."
Now I ask myself if I want everyone to know all the intimate details of my early life. Is that what I want to contribute? My writing, over the years, has become so much better. What I have to say now is so much more important than what I had to say then. I have always wanted to have a gift to give the world. Something really worthy to leave behind for others to gather courage from. I want that gift to be worthy.
All of those journals were like a safe cocoon I was spinning around myself for protection. A cocoon in which I could grow privately, out of the public view. It was like a nest high in the trees, full of magpie scraps of life shoved in the the crevices for warmth against a winter that lasted for many years. A bird has to leave its nest. A butterfly cannot live life in its cocoon or it will die. When the bird leaves the nest the nest slowly decays with disuse. Or it is borrowed by new birds. The nest is just a vehicle. Sometimes we find them shattered on the ground and pick them up with all the care and awe we save for the most delicious artifacts. Do butterflies come back to visit their discarded cocoons in a reverent display of nostalgia? They do not. Cocoons drift away in the wind.
You emerge from life. You do it in whatever way you need to, but all the shadows of past selves, all the ghosts we carry around only weigh us down. I emerged from my nest, but it's as though I have been carrying it around on my head for years. How ridiculous to see a bird cross the Atlantic with last spring's nest when it is headed for new trees, new meadows, and new adventures in which the old nest is nearly useless.
Why do we hang on? Do you think my first diary is something precious? Let me share an unedited passage with you which makes me sound like a hit man approaching my first job:
"Dear Diary, I had I good day today. I got my packet done. I want to find a secret garden of my own. it would be fun. I am getting rid of Kim Kay Keyser! but I don't really know how but I will figure it out."
Or how about this sweet gem of psychic content:
"Dear Diary, Today was Bad! Bad! Bad! Horrible! Horrible! Horrible! Sally got away! Our best bunny! Sally! our broun French Lop bunny rabbit!!! My mom and dad are arguing a bunch! It is so bad I ran up to my bedroom and cried and cried. I think they might get in divorce!!! I hope not! I pray God not. Amen."
I know you're curious to read one of my very early poems. On August 18 of (I think) 1980 I wrote this very deep poem called "Life is hard":
Life is hard sometimes,
work to be done,
children to watch,
races to be run,
bills to be filled,
pears to be chilled,
yes life is hard,
but you can make the best of it,
do what has to be done,
and there will always be time to sit,
yes it's something you've got to admit.
Alice of Future Girl has given me courage to do something with these old early diaries and journals of mine. I haven't yet been able to bring myself to burn them. I keep feeling like there's got to be a more poetic way to strip myself of this shroud of words. I need to fly. In this particularly lean point of time in my life I feel it would benefit me to shed the weights my spirit has been carrying. I need a lot of courage right now. So I'm going to make a wish box papered in those journals. And I will put them in my shop too. A box you can give to anyone needing to set themselves free, needing the courage to move forward, to make change, to rise from the ashes with a new set of wings.
Dammit. I can't say it without sounding amazingly cliched. So I will have to show you. I am going to go into my (now) set up studio and make the first one. Then I'll show you my little box of courage. Perhaps if I give other people little pieces of myself I will grow lighter. Perhaps others can take that piece of me to buoy themselves against a rough time.