What on Earth Was I Thinking When I Started Journaling?

The teachers had instilled in us young children to write.  They wanted us to write sentences about things like:  personal interests, people, places, and things.  I was programmed from the time I could put a sentence together to journal.  Yet, something so innocent, can be used against you as you grow older.  Those optimistic teachers didn't warn us children about parents who would give you a hard time about the things you write about them or others (they think are them).  They didn't prepare us for the sacrifices we would make for writing or not writing from partners to networks.  They didn't tell us that there was such a thing as Writer's Block.  They didn't tell us that we could break the rules sometimes with generalizations, exaggerations, fiction, and poor grammar without excuse.  They surely didn't warn us about the myriad of mean-spirited emotions, strange voices, and weird muses that help to periodically give us our best work. 

What on earth was I thinking when I started journaling?

I didn't know many decades ago, in my child-like mind, that writings could be used to identify one's personality and other hidden things about one's self that you rather the world not know.  I hadn't a clue about building confidence through writing, finding a mental release after trauma, or anything else that may have been deemed helpful growing up had I not been so scared to write down my true self for so many years of my childhood. 

Recently, I realized, after ripping one of my many diaries in two, that what was supposed to be my childhood diaries was really someone else's--an angry girl who had been micro-managed to the point that she was unsure of how she truly felt about things since others made decisions for her.  Others insisted they were right even when they were wrong.  People who had problems that they didn't want an inquisitive little girl to uncover.  A bright child who was told by the media to write about boys and rant about parents through television shows.  But what I really wanted to write about is now on 15 plus blogs, show up in over 100 plus videos, and are presented in seven plus books in a few different categories and I'm still not satisfied (sigh). 

Too many vital years of controlling men and deceptive women suffocating my core through emotional abuse (and a past of domestic violence) has long been the fuel that has kept me writing.  However, I received great news at the start of the year from a world beyond this one, "You are free!  You are free!"  No longer bound by my past, I have arrived to my present and look forward to my future. 

Nicholl McGuire