So far, 29 volumes of my journals are preserved for all time in PDF images.

 

That’s an average of ten per day, and I hope to keep up the same pace during the entire project. It takes about four hours per ten volumes. Some volumes are shorter, others longer, and some of them have things folded and tucked inside that I also want to keep (photos, letters to people, etc.) or send to people who will appreciate them most, if they want them. For exmple, I have quite a few things in them that I know Jackie will want and that Sue Rossetti will probably want the items I have that relate to her mom (my English teacher and writing mentor) Alpha Rossetti.

 

I’m up to February 22nd, 1987 in them, including a pre-journal and two, two-part journals, for a total of  29 volumes. So, that’s just the first 18 years of my journal- keeping stash so far. And I’m about a year into my budding relationship/partnership with DeForest and Carolyn Kelley. (De had my story about meeting him published in TV Star Parade in January 1969 when I was a  senior in high school, but we didn’t connect again personally until 1986 during a 20th anniversary Star Trek convention in Spokane.) So, thus far in the journals, I’m still in the star-struck stage and living in Washington State. (I didn’t move to Hollywood until 1989, when my personal friendship with the Kelleys really went off the charts.)

 

I wrote journals until quite a few years after I got my first PC, for some reason

 

Don’t know why I didn’t seque to typing into my PC sooner; maybe I’ll find out in my journals! (Perhaps I felt I couldn’t think creatively fast enough to type what was going through my head.) The last journal I have to preserve goes from August 24, 2002 to April 8, 2003. After that, my journals were all saved online or in blog posts, I believe!  All I know is that’s when these written journals took their bow for good…

 

It’s amazing what you forget about your life, even when you take pains to write it all down, as I did!

 

In spot-checking these tomes, I find passages that tell me I worked at the Puyallup Fair, which I had totally forgotten about and that I was friendly and helpful to older folks whom I no longer even remember!  It’s blowing my mind.

 

I also noted that I called myself out on my own BS and/or insecurity quite frequently!

 

I wondered how honest I was back then, or whether I embellished, or put a patina on, incidents, interactions, and activities that put me in a less than stellar light. Nope!  I didn’t do that!  I was darned hard on myself much of the time.  I’d state my case on a  matter and then reconsider (in writing) whether I was over-reacting or missing cues. I’d nearly always give my “adversary” a mile of slack and do my best to consider it from their perspective.

 

So, I reckon I considered my journals a safe harbor in which to express exactly what I was thinking and feeling, without wondering if anyone else would ever read them. That’s good!  So, I’ll probably run across places that embarrass the hell out of me, as a result, but I haven’t yet. I have a feeling that will change, though!

 

At one point I even put a disclaimer in the front of several volumes notifying future readers that I’ve always been a work in progress and probably no longer feel exactly the same way about my sisters, parents, and others who had the misfortune of sharing their orbits with a budding writer who wrote about what s/he knew, which included interactions with them!  (So far, MOST of what I said about my nuclear family was positive, but we did have our share of frustration, anger and wrath!)

 

I’ve already found passages that confirm I’m neurotypical (almost certainly on the autism spectrum) and transgender, and always have been. There were no terms for these realities back then (or if there were, I didn’t know about them), so I was “in the closet,” hiding my essence from the world. There’s great poignancy in some of the passages, as a result.

 

Reliving one’s life is quite the eye-opener. You get to watch yourself grow up, gain wisdom, and figure things out about yourself and others that only time and attention can bring.

 

I hope you are keeping journals.  If you aren’t, I encourage you to start TODAY!!