My Pre-Blogging days

Before I was a blogger, I was a journal keeper. No big suprise there huh? I started keeping a journal the summer before my 8th grade year. It was a journal from Sanrio, makers of Hello Kitty. It looked a little something like this:



That first journal is chock-full of innocent crushes I had in my early teens and the difficulties I had my eighth grade year.

I filled up that first journal pretty quickly and soon I had amassed a collection.



Those journals hold the highs and lows of high school, the adventure of setting off to college and some amazing family trips taken over the years. When I lived at home and it was tornado season, I kept a duffel bag of what was most important to me so I could make a quick run to the storm cellar if need be. What was contained in that duffel bag was my many volumes of journals, my photo albums and the stuffed bear my Dad had given me the day I was born. No clothes, no jewelry went in that bag, just my memories.

I once had a friend go through one of my journals when I was in college, it was one of the most humiliating things I had gone through at that point. To have someone go through your private thoughts and then call you on it? I was beyond mad and I thought for awhile our friendship would end, but we mended it and are still friends to this day. I always told my friends and now I tell Sean, that if I should die unexpectedly that they should burn all my journals immediately. I'm sure some might look at it as a great rememberance of my life, but to me, my journals are my innermost thoughts and confessions and I couldn't bare anyone reading them after I was gone.

I've been trying to keep a journal this past year, but I find I rarely write in it. I've gotten out of the habit of writing in it and with blogging online I sometimes don't feel the need to write twice a day in different forms. I love looking back so much on what I have written that I feel bad about not keeping a hard-copy of what I am experiencing in my life right now. It's just not the same to go back and look at my old Xanga, MySpace and Blogger posts.

So here's to many more years of online and plain old old-school journaling!