MY PAPER THERAPIST

    I have kept a diary since 8th grade. I treasured the green leather cover and thought to write scintillating, witty, romantic entries in it. Unfortunately, as a girl in a very small rural high school, there weren't too many candidates for romance. Unless you count Pat Boone in our first ever class book club...

    Although, I do remember in 8th grade--that awful, sweaty, nervous, year of no confidence--a marvelous day when a boy hit my arm with a ruler. Not too hard, but hard enough to notice.

     "I think Eddie Kushcka likes me!" I shouted in caps in my diary that evening. Who knows where this might end? He could meet me at a dance in the gym. Or even ask me out on a date. Not that I knew anything about dates at that time in my life.

     I had a 5-year diary which I wrote in faithfully through High School on the miniature lines, which gave me the sense that my life was crowded and full of fun. Once each year, when I visited my best friend from camp, we'd sit on a bed and read aloud from our diaries, to catch up on each other's lives. Our diaries were like long-distance phone calls over the year, tying us together with threads of compassion, love, and laughter.

     Then came college, boyfriends, more than sleepovers, a professor who was interested in me--not in a good way--and revolutions in how I thought about life as I took Cultural History, a Bates tradition of covering all the high points in art, architecture, music, theology, writing, and more. It was wonderful and led to many diary entries as I changed my mind about life and faith. (Thanks, Prof. Brown!)

     When I look back on my old diaries, I am astounded by the passion with which I lived. And loved.  Someone was either "fabulous," "insightful," "compassionate," "sexy," or "irretrievably wretched."  Such soarings of joy; such plummettings into the depths of hell.  There seemed to be no middle ground at all.

     In later diaries, after marriage, I noted down my children's first steps, first words, first swears, first disobedience, and the first time one put a hand on my arm and said, "It's all right, Mom."

     What I want to suggest to you is the power of "The Paper Therapist."  That came out in a phone conversation recently when I suggested to a friend who was having a difficult time to get a diary, note down what was happening in her life, and also begin a gratitude journal.

   There is something about seeing your troubles in dark ink on a white page which lessens them, as if you were looking through a set of binoculars backwards  The sadness, the worry, the fear blur and become smaller once they are words on a page. Or, as I found on Jan. 1st in "Writer's Almanac" with Garrison Keillor, a marvelous quote from the poem, "The New Year" (from Some Glad Morning by Barbara Crooker), "..the empty page craves the pen,/ unscrolling on its skin."

     Of course, you don't have your beloved therapist sitting opposite you making helpful, insightful comments about the ways you could manage your emotions and what paths you might take forwards. I miss that. But writing it all down on paper is a close second and far cheaper. And this is a picture of just a few of my diaries, some going back to 1958, and there are many more on the shelf.

     You may find that looking at the sentences, shutting them away, and opening the diary again a day or so later gives you new insights. You might even say aloud, "Why was I so upset that day? Over THAT?"

     It is humbling to keep a diary. But it is a fruitful practice, and also a place to scribble down inspiring quotes, bits of overhead conversations, and reflections from poets & theologians to lift our hearts from: Fr. Rohr, Fr. Rolheiser, Parker Palmer, Anne Lamott, Barbara Brown Taylor, Henri Nouwen, F. Buechner, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and Fr. Martin. And don't forget the always shimmering Mary Oliver who will authenticate what you are feeling and open your heart so it no longer feels like a cold, closed fist.