Down and dirty journaling

Life isn’t all about rainbows and unicorns. Or mine isn’t at least. Family stuff happens. Health stuff happens. Life happens. For me, writing has always been an outlet. I’ve poured my heart out on many a diary page, e-mail, and even Word documents. It’s how I process things. I almost always feel better afterwards, and for the most part, nobody will ever see these long incoherent ramblings.

Somewhere along the line I started putting these words on scrapbook pages. It’s strange and uncomfortable because that’s not why I scrapbook. I scrapbook to remember the happy fun times. But every once in a while I get the urge to tell a not so happy story. I usually try to avoid the story. I do my best to ignore it. But some stories just won’t go away. They stick around, nudging me, then pushing me, invading my brain and keeping me from sleep. It’s usually at that point where I say “Fine! You win!” I go to my Notes app on the iPad, or Evernote, or a piece of paper. And I write. And write. Ignoring typos and proper sentence structure  as the story comes pouring out. I use run on sentences a lot. It’s not pretty. Once the story is finally put on paper (or in a document), I can finally rest. The story monster has been satiated.

Sometimes that’s where it ends. But every once in a while one of the stories makes it onto a scrapbook page. For these pages I try to keep the elements to a minimum. I usually don’t use photos. I’ll copy and paste the journaling that I did earlier onto the page. I don’t do much editing on these pages. The typos and run on sentences will stay there as a little joke with myself, reminding me that no matter what the subject matter, I can’t take this stuff too seriously.

So here are a few of my “down and dirty journaling” pages. I know some of them are kind of hard to read, but if you click on them you’ll get a bigger more clear version.

A page about the decision whether or not to have children.

A page about my fear of going blind one day.

A page about being un-beautiful that I did a long time ago. It kind of goes along the same lines as my bullying post I wrote recently.

A page about my conflicted feelings towards the house we used to live in.

A page about the first time Little Man said “I love you”

Another page about LM and how we’re not the “typical” family.

And one last page, because sometimes you just have to say “I’m sorry for being a bitch that one time”.

So there you go. Now you must think I’m a complete neurotic self absorbed insecure crazy person right? Well yeah. Sometimes. When I’m not thinking of rainbows and unicorns. 🙂

I do try to end most of these pages on a lighter more positive note. I think it kind of balances out the heavier stuff. And also keeps things in perspective.

Have you done much down and dirty journaling? I’d love to see some pages 🙂