Do I think I’ll write daily up to a hundred times this year?
That would be cool.
I’ve thought about journaling more and more recently. I used to do it in my twenties (handwritten and all) without hesitation. The year I was dumped, I filled up an entire velvet-covered book. It’s one of my most important possessions: a capsule of me in heartbreak and moving slowly out of it.
The things that trigger a need to write are moments I can’t take a picture of because they are small and quick, but they stay in my mind enough to want to put them on paper. I think of my aunt’s visit to Florida.
I only had one morning to sit and chat with her and my mom, and marathon chat we did. There were tears, remembering my uncle; there were laughs over stories new and old. But then I had to go, and there was that twinge to stay inside of that moment. Both my aunt and my mom hadn’t yet changed out of their PJs. My mom, in all black as she always is; my aunt, in soft eggshell white. They stood shoulder to shoulder, telling me to be careful and to protect my heart. Their height and expressions linking them as sisters, their faces earnest and beautiful without a stitch of makeup.
There it is. There’s the moment I’d like to keep forever.
Today I had a less urgent reason to write. Gigi’s asleep by my leg, a pillow on my lap. I keep picking up my phone to check apps on it, but there’s nothing to check. I removed it all as part of a thirty day “dry January” experiment for social media. This doesn’t mean I don’t find sneaky workarounds (looking at you, Chrome browser), but it’s been interesting.
I was supposed to do it on January 1st, but as most people reading this know: social media is addictive as hell. Over the years I often feel the need to deactivate, if I notice I’m comparing too much, or if small things (outside of the political and social realm) get to me. I become more reactionary or resentful and I remove myself from it.
Plus, I’m taking a Humanities course, and one of the first things it referenced was the illusion of closeness social media can provide. This gave me the final prompt I needed to remove the apps.
So, here I sit on a Sunday morning. Without my crack (aka the viewing of Stories or memes from my cousin) or scrolling mindlessly through Reddit posts you might find on r/amioverreacting, or watching an endless algorithm of reels that eventually don’t make me laugh or teach me anything but instead leave me wanting and in desperate need to live.
If any of this resonates, dear reader, and if you came this far? Do it with the proverbial me. Delete the apps. It feels like I’m missing something I can’t quite put my finger on, but I wonder how it will feel thirty days later.
And I’ll get to write about it.
Thoughts?