Dear Diary: Maybe I should keep one

I have never, ever, EVER been able to keep a diary or journal.I did have a notebook I wrote poetry and short stories in when I was a teen. I wrote a lot. But I never cared about writing down my actual thoughts and experiences on a daily basis. Or even a weekly basis. I would occasionally start a diary and it would last a couple of days and then I'd find it a few months later, buried under whatever detritus was on my bedroom floor.I'd read what I'd written, cringe, close it and lose it again for a few months.I never, ever lost track of my writing notebook. I suppose it was a journal in a way - just in poetic and fictionalized fashion. I dunno. Maybe that was a journal or diary - just in the format that was most useful to me.Having grown up on Long Island, I obviously had a period where I went to talking therapy. It never really worked out, because I would internally think, "Who in the hell are you that you're asking me this crap. What about you? How messed up is your life?"I would start out saying really cold things that I wanted to shock them with - in hindsight, they probably weren't that cold. It's not as if I was telling them I wanted to kill puppies or anything like that - eventually, I'd go to an appointment, and they'd ask me what was going on the previous week and I'd be all teenaged and say stuff like, "You know, the usual."After a while, the appointments were them asking me stuff, me answering in a perfunctory manner, them trying to dig more into it and me staring at them. Very good use of time and money. Sigh.Whatever. I guess I turned out mostly OK. And yet I still wrote. And wrote.Then I went to college. I was in the journalism program, and I had to write for that. A lot. In my Basic Writing class, I got to write narrative, expository and descriptive pieces, so not straight journalism. By sophomore year, I was eyeballs deep in writing for the school paper, taking Newswriting and basically just doing journalistic writing - which can use creative turns of phrase, but isn't creative writing. Or isn't supposed to be, at least.As the years went on, I wrote less for myself, and more and more for everyone else.Now, as I've embarked on this year of writing, for the first time I find that perhaps a daily journal - something I can write but not share with the world - might do me some good. I have a lot of things I want to say and want to write about that I don't really want to share with everyone.Sometimes that's because it's no one's business.Sometimes that's because I don't want to deal with everyone's crap if they don't like what I'm writing about.Sometimes that's because it's more political and my feelings are a combination of the two above.So maybe some days this year I won't actually publish what I write - but I will write. I have empty journals galore (I've always loved buying writing notebooks, even if I didn't write in them). I have to give myself permission to write what I really feel, even if I'm not prepared to share it with more people.Photo by Dariusz Sankowski via Unsplash.