How a Journal Saved My Life

Do you keep a diary? Maybe you should...

I’ve wanted to write more essays like this for a while now. Remember how much fun we had 10 years ago when I regularly posted on my blog? Most of my time is taken up with Alethea’s Moving Castle these days (have you noticed?) but I want to try. So here I am. If you’d like to support this effort, please consider getting a paid Substack subscription, becoming a Patron, or tossing a buck in the tip jar that Chris and I can use it for gas money when we’re out stormchasing in May!

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How a Journal Saved My Life

My favorite school visits were always to middle schools. I really do love those misfits. One of the two bits of wisdom I always made sure to tell them was: Keep a journal. Not only is it good for you, but it may also save your life someday. Like it saved mine.

The great thing about knowing exactly what you want to do with your life when you’re eight years old (acting and writing) is that people constantly give you things like books and journals. I started keeping diaries very early on. It was a great way to purge all the tumultuous emotions inside myself. The culture shock of moving from New England to the Deep South at 6, filming a PBS miniseries at 8, and then having my best friend turn her back on me at 10…plus living with a parent in chronic pain who had no idea what to do with her genius child…it was a lot.

“Now that I write these things down, I pray I’ll forget them and never read them again, but I know they’ll haunt my memories and dreams for a long time. I wish they didn’t have to.” That was from an entry on my last day of 8th grade. I was 13.

I started writing fiction pretty heavily in high school—until then, my output was mostly essays, notes to Margo and Casey, and poetry. In high school I began rewriting the novel I had started when I was 11 (The Golden Band); Casey, Margo, Chris and I worked on a collaborative fantasy novel (The Legacy); and I challenged myself to write as many new fairy tales as I could, each starring a princess whose name started with a different letter of the alphabet. (I finished Ellie, Sarah, and Aletta before abandoning that project.)

I knew that the very act of writing was therapeutic, because I could tell. My neck and shoulders and back would ache after a marathon writing season, the skin on the finger where I have a callus from holding my pen would split and bleed as it pulled away from the fingernail, but my head and heart always felt amazing. Deep down I knew there was probably some psychology behind this, but I didn’t care. I just kept writing.

I wasn’t as consistent with my journaling after I left high school, but I was constantly finding a new beautiful book and starting again with the intention of keeping up with it. I remember at some point Casey telling me, “Don’t write down only bad things. Write all the good moments that deserve to be remembered.” So I did that, because Casey is brilliant. It reminded me to journal more often when good things happened. Re-reading the entries was more fun that way, too. My blog came along at exactly the right time (2004), as there was so much amazing stuff going on in my life. I thought about Casey every time.

And I still kept a journal, for those things that were too personal to share online. Like when those turbulent emotions popped up again and I didn’t know what to do with them. Like about the boyfriend that I caught lying to me for no good reason—who tells you on the phone that they’re at a cafe when they’re clearly at home?—and who kept getting into scrapes and needing money all the time. I gave him the first half of the AlphaOops book advance, and then the second half. I even gave him top billing on the first book I ever published. Eventually I started a separate bank account for the next time he found himself in yet another emergency.

But maintaining a long-distance relationship is difficult even for the best of couples, and I loved him with all my heart. He even asked me to marry him! Actually got down on one knee and proposed. Only, the paperwork to make that part of our relationship a reality dragged on and on. I did everything I could on my end short of driving to an embassy to sort things out. I served every ball I could into his court, and none of them ever came back across the net. They just sat there.

As I couldn’t sort out any of these feelings on my blog where he could see it, I picked up my journal. Curious how long it had been since I had written anything, I flipped back to the last entry where I had purged emotions like this. It was dated a year ago. And as I re-read it, I was shocked to realize: I could have written it yesterday. All the feelings I had about the things that were happening then were the exact same things happening now. An entire year had passed, and nothing had changed.

He never was going to marry me.

He was just going to string me along and bleed me dry. Emotionally and financially. And I couldn’t argue with this realization, because it hadn’t been pointed out to me by my friend, my mother, or my sister. I had effectively just told myself what was happening.

And when he asked for money one more time, and I wrote the letter that broke my own heart, he responded with, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

Yup. The bastard even ruined Douglas Adams for me.

But the bleeding stopped.

My soul splintered into a million pieces and scattered away on the wind. My family and friends helped me salvage what was left and glued it back together into some semblance of a person. I rose from the ashes. I grew. I became a princess. And the scar tissue…well, that just made me an even better writer. And an excellent classroom speaker.

So, kids, be sure to listen to your Fairy Godmother Lee. Always keep a journal. It just might save your life someday.

Do you keep a journal?