OK, yes, it’s very sad and – by the standards of morality commonly accepted in this country – wrong, that an 8-year-old Saudi Arabian girl has been forced into marriage with a 47-year-old man in order to settle her father’s debts. But Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation and it is not our place to tell them how they have to treat their citizens, nor to impose our own made-up morality on others. It also does not mean that Saudis are “cave-dwelling animals.” (By the way, Saudi Arabia is hardly the only country in which this kind of thing happens. Why all the press over this particular incident in this particular country? Is it because the majority of ignoramuses who populate the ole US of A aren’t very fond of Muslims these days?) Get the fuck over your self-righteousness and indignation.
Now that we have that out of the way …
I haven’t written in a long time. First, I was too tired all the time. Then I was too depressed. Nothing seems to happen when I try to write. I’m consumed with thoughts of pregnancy and the baby, except not really. It’s not so much actual thoughts as this sort of cloud that hangs over my brain at all times, forcing out all other thought unless I work really hard at it. And that’s just not interesting to write about, and it’s even less interesting to read about, so I haven’t written. Since I’m not writing, and I’m not in class this semester, and I’m not playing my saxophone, and winter will never truly end, and I’m not doing a fantastic job at work these days, and I’ve pretty much cut out everything in my life that means something to me, I’m just depressed all the time. Coupled with hormones the likes of which I’ve never experienced – on Easter Sunday I told my husband that I felt like I could shoot flaming balls of hormones out of my eyes at anyone who looked at me (“the f – it -flam – flames. Flames, on the side of my face …”) – not to mention that I’m pretty unattractive these days (I’m 16 again, complete with acne, bacne, and a cyst on my chest reappearing in the exact location it was for junior prom) and I don’t own a single article of clothing that truly fits, means I am one sad pregnant lady. Nobody tells you that you might be depressed during pregnancy. Oh, sure, we’ve made great strides in publicizing postpartum depression and making it a recognized medical condition instead of just brushing it off as the “baby blues.” But during the pregnancy, well, you’re supposed to “glow” then, and you’re supposed to be happy, overjoyed, ecstatic, ALL THE TIME, and if you aren’t, you’re probably a terrible mother and a terrible person, and you don’t really deserve to have a child.
Several weeks ago my mom told me that maybe I needed to not try to blog anymore and just go back to writing in my journal. She was right of course, but I’ve tried that, and the problem is that writing in my journal requires actual writing. Pen on paper. Mechanical manipulations of my hand. A decent pen. Do you know how long it has been since I’ve written anything of any length by hand? Years. Even in class I don’t take notes really because my classes just aren’t really note-taking classes. You can’t be expected to take notes on the esoteric secrets of the universe as you wax philosophical about art, literature, spirituality, history, and the wonders of the human brain. It gets in the way. It has been at least four years since I was in the habit of writing anything of any length by hand. I’m out of practice and it hurts after just a few minutes.
This saddens and distresses me. I like writing by hand. Throughout most of college, I wrote all my best papers mainly by hand and then typed them: I found the flow of thoughts came more easily that way. I liked the look of the paper with my secret system of color-coding, and the text in the margins until every usable space was filled with my words, the arrows pointing this way and that so that when I read through what I’d written I had to figure out which passages I really wanted where. I appreciated the tactile sensation of the bumps and dips of the ink, the sound of the shuffling papers, the increasing rattle and brittleness of the paper with the more ink it had to hold, the smell of paper and ink joining together, the seeming fragility of it all.
Writing by hand was liberating. I wasn’t tempted to edit as I wrote because it was just too damned much trouble.
Now my hand hurts too much and the feel of the pen is no longer natural, and I get frustrated by the inability of my hand to keep up with my thoughts. I have succumbed to the need for speed, and while typing provides none of the inherent pleasures of writing, it does allow me to put words on a page at nearly the rate I think of them. Perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps not.
Last night I fell asleep thinking about all the journals I can remember keeping. There’s the spiral-bound one made of recycled paper and cardboard that my cousin gave me in junior high. That’s the one that started it. It was followed by the enormous one with a lion on the cover that I bought for myself from Borders: it housed many a dramatic day of junior high and high school, and bears witness to the several variations in how I wrote my a’s, k’s, and G’s. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but next I recall the one my friend Bethany gave to me as a high school graduation gift. It was just the right size and it carried me through all five years of college (albeit with a six-month break as I used a smaller one – also a gift from a friend – for my travels in Wales and Europe). I recall many fond hours with that diary. I carried it around campus with me and would write in it in quiet moments before class. I don’t know how I would have come to anything approaching self-actualization without it. Its last entry was written through tears hours after I handed in my last paper and sat alone in my dorm room drinking champagne out of an OU-05 mug, wondering how I had reached the point of college graduate. I finished that entry on the last page of the journal. The aforementioned journal I used in Wales is another favorite, full of my wonder and observations about the places I visited, the people I met, and myself in the world. There’s the dream diary I bought, one side for daydreams, the other for night dreams. I have recorded exactly one dream in it, and an unpleasant one at that. There’s the Sierra Club one that I’m certain was a gift, also from Bethany, I think, that I carried everywhere for years, and used as a “story and essay ideas” journal, though none of my particularly good work ever materialized from notes written in it. There’s the beautiful blue suede one that snaps closed and has wonderfully soft pages that my mom gave to me, which became the place for writing down my questions about religion, Bible passages, spirituality, and what faith I ever held. Though I have long since abandoned Bible study, I miss the mental and emotional quests such study sent me on, and the neat (my writing in that journal is always strikingly neat) questions, observations, and occasional conclusions I drew. Then there’s my diary of today, a small, red, faux-leather bound college graduation gift from a wonderful woman I hold as a friend, though I don’t know her well. Though I have had it for four years it is less than 1/3 full, and most of the entries are pretty uninspired and uninspiring. It seems that as I entered the adult world, I forgot how to put pen to paper and write.
While journaling electronically is not an acceptable long-term solution (imagine all the journals above being replaced by filenames: there’s no magic in that, no romance, no sense of centuries-old joy and ageless continuity) it may have to be my interim solution until I can get my hand back in shape and teach my brain to slow down a little or to accept that I can’t capture it all. If I don’t start writing again I’ll have no way of keeping these hormones in check, and that’s really just not fair to my husband.
So, starting immediately, I will no longer be writing here with even the vague sense of audience that I have always reserved this space for, and I will no longer try to make anything comprehensible to those outside of my own head. Maybe I’ll even use that nifty “private” feature if I’m so inclined to get fancy. Eventually, I fully expect to turn this back into something resembling a blog (but then, I also fully expect to someday fit back into my old jeans after I have this baby, so I’m possibly delusional). Until then, I hope a few of you will enjoy the ride as I crack open this new journal for its virgin entries.
