I’m Adopted: I’m glad I Kept A Journal

The experience of helping my youngest daughter move out of her college apartment had an unexpected benefit.  It was after the last few boxes had been emptied and their contents stowed haphazardly in her closet at home, that she appeared in the doorway of the little cubicle I call my office.

“Mom, can you use these notebooks for any of your writing projects?” she asked.  

I studied the handful of 5×7 leather bound journals still sleeping in the cellophane.  I held out my hand, accepting her gift. In six weeks she’d be heading off to Wash. DC, embarking on her next adventure in life: her first full-time job.  Her position as an analyst at a hotel REIT would require hours at a computer. The sweet little notebooks, a thoughtful graduation gift from an elderly relative, would languish on a dusty shelf or at the bottom of a sweatshirt drawer.

I love notebooks.  It doesn’t matter if they are the spiral bound Mead variety or the simple black and white composition notebooks required for grammar schools.  There is a promise intrinsic in the first blank page, the urging to think great thoughts, and to get that creativity down within the tidy lines.  

I confess to being an intermittent journaler.  When I reorganized my storage area in the dank depths of the old Victorian I sold a few years ago, I came upon the box of journals I had kept as a teenager.  They’d been buried under carefully wrapped photographs. I thought that I’d lost them, but in unearthing them I recovered a part of myself.

As I flipped through the spirals, I was catapulted into a time in my life that was wrought with frustration, angst, and deep sadness.  In most of the pages, I learned about the young woman, me, who dared to admit only to herself how much she yearned to know why she was adopted. She questioned her birth parents motives, and expressed openly that she didn’t gel with her surroundings (in spite of being adopted with a twin sister).  As I turned the handwritten pages, I heard my teenage voice, an adopted young woman who was grappling with identity and purpose (see blog about ‘The Importance of Personal Story’).  I think that uncertain young woman would be relieved that her adult self went looking for answers and found them.

The process of deciding to bust open my closed adoption was (detailed in the video on my website) a result of having a breast biopsy and realizing that possessing my medical history was not just something I needed to own for me. My background was owed to my family, my four children.  That quest for medical information and a need for my personal story thrust me into the journaling life again.

This time, instead putting a pen to paper, my journaling was at a computer.  Religiously, I backed up my electronic journal. I edited, rewrote sections, added quotes and research. This electronic journal, just like the spiral notebooks, was purely therapeutic.  It validated my thoughts, helped me work through issues, and it got me writing. It was for my eyes only. It was not a piece of creative nonfiction.

As I compose the memoir about finding my birth family, that computer journal and those musty teenage spiral notebooks have become valuable reference material.  They are the facts I lean on when my memory is fuzzy. Without all those pages at my fingertips, the details on which I base the scenes in my book would lack the authenticity that I feel I owe my readers.  I want to share this part of my story.

I treasure my journals.  All of them. As for the new ones, gifted me by a 22-year-old young professional, I have earmarked each with a purpose.  The white one with gold stars nestles in the console cabinet between the front seats of my Tahoe. I write in it at stoplights and in parking lots when I have a creative burst. The solid aqua one resides in my computer backpack, accompanies me to writing class, seminars and conferences.  In it I keep track of how much I write each day, the topics and ideas I am musing. It’s a running list kind of journal.

Journals have always been a part of my life, continue to be vital to my writing life, and are a source of pleasure to review.  Think about using journals to record your thoughts, as a daily record, as a springboard to something creative. You never know where it will lead.  I am certain Anne Frank had no idea her words scrawled in a tiny attic space would capture the hearts and emotions of so many. Your special little notebook is a cheap investment.  You never know who will thank you one day: your progeny, your older self, or some random stranger.

Go ahead.  Buy a journal.  Invest in yourself.  I promise you, it’s worth it.