When I was a kid, I collected journals and notepads. I would tug on my mom’s sleeve and beg her to buy me the cutest one I could find – adorned with glitter or emblazoned with a kitschy quote or complete with a free matching pen. I was lucky enough to have a bookshelf in my room, luckier still that it was full to the brim, and for most of my adolescent life a solid half of that shelf would be littered with mountains and mountains of these notebooks.
And it wasn’t just a love of journals that captured me, it was a love of writing. I remember being seven, set a homework task to write a story about someone overcoming a challenge or an obstacle, and being paralysed with choice. Stories were a huge deal to me then: every story you’re told, whether it was written hundreds of years ago or made up on the spot by your grandad, is not only 100% true and based in real logic, but is also the greatest thing you have ever heard. So as I sat there, pencil to page (yet to earn my coveted pen license), I froze.
None of my stories were as good as anything I’d heard. How could I possibly live up to the great tales of Willy Wonka and his marvellous factory, or a wonderful fish with rainbow scales, or the fables of my mom and her sister in their youth? In hindsight, I could have written about myself. I could have created a metatextual analysis detailing my struggles in that very moment to put into simple terms the complex frustrations and insecurities I did not yet have the vocabulary to express. But, again, I was seven.
I got better at creating stories. I would write pages and pages of half-finished novels, plays, magazine articles, anything I felt compelled to make. I did well in English at school, all things considered, with creative writing being both my most enjoyed and highest scoring pieces of work in the subject. I no longer put pen to page but rather fingers to keyboard, to phone, to tablet. I started to write my thoughts and feelings down like they were their own stories. I bought diaries and DIY self-help books with the same blind enthusiasm that I persuaded me to buy those journals.
I couldn’t count how many journals, diaries, notepads I’ve bought. But when I went back to my childhood home house, back into my bedroom, and up to my old bookshelf now greyed with dust, and I leafed through those books, I laughed. Stories were a huge deal to me, and so I never thought of one good enough to put into a journal. Or ten. Or half a bookshelf full.
All this to say, I want to think of this blog as a kind of online journal. And look at that – this one isn’t blank.
Gemlin the Gremlin 