🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Someone🎶
Violin/Model🎻
Desk Cleanout📖
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- Quiet reflection.
- Soul-touching music.
- Clouds.
Wordle 1,082 4/6
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Connections
Puzzle #360
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The song in my head when I woke up: A popular Morning Brain song … “Someone You Loved,” by Lewis Capaldi
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: It’s easy to say/But it’s never the same/I guess I kinda liked the way you numbed all the pain
Commute Tunes: Todays drive to work was done to songs from John’s Ultimate Chill Song Compendium, which you really should listen to.
- With Or Without You, U2
- It’s Not Over, Daughtry
- Son of a Sinner, Jelly Roll
- Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town, Pearl Jam
- Mr. Jones, Counting Crows
- She Talks To Angels, The Black Crows
- Tell Her This, Del Amitri
- Home, Daughtry
Something I’m looking forward to today: Boy The Younger is singing in a concert given by some electric violinist/model, which is an amazing combination.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Having my new home office desk all set up.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Getting stuff cleaned up in our garage after work.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved the story to an article about the fundamentals behind pension risk transfer. Yeah, I write the sexy stuff.
What I’ve written: A Shield from the Storm: 3 steps to help insurance companies weather the coming labor crunch
I began journaling in earnest after getting out of the hospital in 2015, thankful to be alive but not really sure how to live. Since then, I have filled the pages of 18 journals and am three-quarters of the way through No. 19.
The concept and benefits of journaling are easy to understand. It’s good. It’s necessary for a person wired as I am. The concept of having journals, however, is something completely different, and it threatens to undermine those benefits of journaling.
Yesterday, I cleaned out the desk and filing cabinet in my home office. Now that I’m working from home more often, I purchased a new, bigger desk with more surface space and storage options. Boy The Younger, ever the budding engineer, is putting it together for me and says he’ll have it done today. This meant I had to get everything off and out of the old setup, and that included the 18 completed journals that were tucked away in chronological order in a drawer.
And after BTY and Wifey Poo left for the former’s choir rehearsal, I made the mistake of thumbing through some of those journals.
They are, in a word, ugly.
I have written a lot about the journey I’ve been on since that day in 2015 in which I started journaling. I don’t know exactly where I am on that journey, but I know I’m a long way from where I was and closer to where I’m going. The process of getting to this point, though, hasn’t been pretty, and the journals reflect that. They are filled with contemporaneous thoughts and beliefs and feelings and actions, and, having read through just a tiny portion of the date range covered, not many are what anyone would call good. If there’s a definition for “how the sausage is made,” those journals just might be it.
I’m not sure what will happen with those journals. I’m not going to live forever, and I can’t take the words on those pages with me, wherever I’m going. Truthfully, I can’t think of one person in my life who would want to read those words, and that matches the number of people who probably should read them. Taken out of context … taken as snippets of a life … they are not a reflection of the me I have become. They are full of days led by a broken individual struggling to find a way to live peacefully and gracefully and happily and with greater contentment. The road to this point in the journey is paved with too much pain to quantify, and the lines in those journals are covered in words that reflect the process, not the destination.
After thumbing through about seven months of the journey, I made myself put the journals away. It seems that I am included on the list of people who shouldn’t be reading them … certainly not alone and certainly not out of context. I set the journals aside, left my home office, went into the family room and sat down by my dog, Luna. She’s a great listener, and so I talked. I wondered aloud about the purpose of having journals and what I should do about their existence. Luna didn’t have many thoughts on the matter. She farted softly and closed her eyes.
What I read last night hurt. It comes from a time in which so much was broken. Yesterday Me wanted to reach through those pages and smack the Then Me in the face … hard … and scream, “What the actual fuck are you doing?!? What are you thinking?!? Would you please get your head out of your ass for just one second?!?” But I can’t. And besides, Then Me wouldn’t listen to Yesterday Me.
I was thinking about the question again on my drive to work, and the best I’ve got is this: Having journals is a great way to see through the bullshit your Today Me tries to tell you. The main topic in the months I read yesterday are about a situation I tend to romanticize as one of the best times in my life … and in some ways, it was.
But.
It was also a time filled with turmoil and pain and heartache and me living in a way that’s not the me I want to be, not the me I think I’ve become. Yes, there was a ton of good about that situation. When I have moments to pause these days, there are memories from then that I reflect on with a smile on my face and an ache in my heart because they were wonderful and did fill buckets that so desperately needed and need to be filled, and they are done. But surrounding all of those smiles and that delightful ache was so much confusion and struggle and pain — not just for me but for a bunch of people who never should have hurt.
Having journals and occasionally thumbing through them is useful in that it strips away the romanticized bullshit your brain clings to about situations that you’d love to remember as great that really might be a little bit less than that. These “times of your life” aren’t always how you remember them, and the contemporaneous musings in a journal force you to confront that truth.
Sometimes, like last night, that truth hurts.
I read about long-forgotten fights and little-remembered incidents that marred what was a pretty dang good situation. I was confronted with ugly thoughts I’d forgotten I once had and can’t imagine today having again. Having those journals reflects a truth more real than the one I’d like to remember.
I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.
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