It was in the late sixties I started keeping a journal. It was a pivotal point in my life.
Forty years ago I knew my emotions were frozen. I could not cry. I did not know how I felt at any moment.
I was deeply depressed.
My journal was a start. It gave me somewhere to go safely.
It was my only outlet (outside of sports) at the time. My writings back then were not that good. I poured out
my depressed feelings.
Eventually some of my entries became poems and even got published.
That was the furthest thing from my mind when I started.
At some point years later I made an
important shift: instead of accenting the negative I started writing more and more about the positive in my life.
I never would have got there if I had not written first about all the things that were bothering me.
At some point I started recording the humorous things that happened around me. It became another
way to diffuse the “craziness” I saw.
I found out decades later I liked making people
laugh at open mikes. And I wrote more and more funny poems.
None of this would have not
happened if I did not start journalling in the late sixties. Now my blogs have almost replaced my journal. Though
entries in my journal still trickle in.
