A Time For Journaling
When I was a little girl, my room was full of journals. In a recent attempt to clean my bookshelf, I found journals dating back as far as six years old, written in nearly illegible handwriting but always making sure to include “Dinner was at home” for a reason I honestly can’t remember.
As I got older, journals became less important to me. I was writing stories in fantasy worlds; it wasn’t as important to keep track of what I was doing in the real world. Even after I got into blogging, I never really considered it the same as journaling - a blog post is a story meant for an audience, whereas a journal entry is meant to be just for the person writing it.
When I was young, and I didn’t quite know how to verbalize some of the things going on in my head, I used to show my journal to my psychiatrist, but it always felt strange. I was always careful to mark the correct page and only show her the smallest amount of text she needed to understand the situation. And now, when I blog, I curate which information I feel comfortable sharing and don’t share a word beyond what I am comfortable with.
But lately, I wondered if this was enough. When I took a break from the blog to try to deal with Nana getting sick and starting hospice, I felt overwhelmed by a sudden rush of feelings that I needed to untangle, but I wasn’t ready to share these feelings with the world.
It was then that I remembered all the hours I spent journaling as a child, and the comfort it brought me. I’d heard of grief journals, but all the ones I saw before were for after losing someone and had prompts to write about the person’s last days, death, and funeral - things that have not happened yet.
It took me a while, but I eventually found a journal relating to a term that was new to me: “anticipatory grief.” It means exactly what it says - the grief of being in the process of losing someone who is still technically here - but it also means so much more. I ordered the journal to be an outlet for the overwhelming confusion of medical decisions and the sudden loss of a relationship Nana was no longer capable of having.
I wound up with a simple journal that started with writing about the person. That, I could do - and I wanted to, so much. But I never knew if my friends were getting sick of hearing about what was going on in my life, and I spoke a lot with my parents but also limited this since we were all so embroiled in the process of keeping Nana safe and figuring out her next steps.
The pages in the beginning of the journal I bought were guided with prompts about death that helped me realize I was lucky in at least some aspects. I had Nana as her full self in my life for thirty years, and she got to see everything from my birth to my recent trip to New Zealand. We didn’t need to forgive each other for anything, and we had no unresolved business - just a jagged end.
The middle pages just had a line for the date and one question: “How are you feeling today?” It seemed a little too loose for me to like at first, when everything was up in the air, but as soon as my pen hit the page, things started to make sense. I journaled in these pages until the complicated knot of emotions started to untangle, and I started to feel like things were more manageable.
And, unexpectedly, the prompts at the end of the journal weren’t about the end of her life. Instead, they were about everything else - the memories we shared, the good times we had, the things I wanted to remember about her as things got worse. The things that were so hard to think of at the moment, but could help so much in the future.
I don’t know if I’m ever going to return to regular journaling. But for now, a little structure to sort through these unfamiliar and overwhelming feelings has been a huge help, and I’ve extended it to other areas of my life as well: I’m writing in a planner book instead of just using my phone, jotting down daily goals and to-do lists, and writing anything else that feels relevant.
Like last week’s shopping trip, this is just something little that I can control. But the more I do to wrangle these feelings, the less powerless I feel at such a tumultuous time.
Michelle Cohen, a writer in the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.