keep a paper journal

Two of my best friends, a couple who are always breaking up with each other, recently split up and I had to listen to both of them pour their heart out. I can’t write about their personal stuff in the blog so the paper diary has been on my bedside table and helped me through their rough patch.

I guess I can consider this done, after all I’ve kept a paper diary for at least 15 years now. It was nice to re-discover it after a 2-year silence.

I’ve been writing a lot in my paper journal lately. My sister has bipolar disorder and she’s gone worse again this week, just as I’m about to go to Finland with the baby, so I’ve had a lot of personal thoughts to write about. I guess this goal is going well then but somehow I can’t get overly excited about it…

My old, half-full diary had turned up from one of the boxes during our recent move, and my partner had left it on the kitchen table with a pen next to it. It’s written in my native Finnish so he can’t read it, but I had mentioned to him a couple a nights ago how writing a blog isn’t quite as de-stressing as keeping a private diary.

I couldn’t resist the temptation of writing in it. I read a couple of pages back, too – the last entry was written in a train on my way to the airport in September 2004.

I was going to Finland for 2 weeks and my new boyfriend was going to follow me in a few days. It was going to be his first visit to Finland, and I insisted to my parents that we were just good friends. That day, I missed the connecting flight and had to stay overnight in Reading with a friend. And now the boyfriend is the father of my child.

It’s great to read back your old journals and discover what your mind was like before this and that important thing happened in your life. That made me want to write the paper journal more often. I love empty journals, too. When I was a kid I used to flick through the empty pages and imagine how beautiful the book would be when it was finished – full of pages of text with pretty hand-writing, full of deep thoughts and dark songs about heartbreak and loneliness.

I think my journal will be different this time, hopefully more bright and happy. I’m intending to write about positive love this time, but I still want to explore the big feelings. And there’s plenty of them still left.