When I was thirteen mom and I went on a little shopping excursion to a local discount department store. Really it was an uneventful trip spent browsing the cluttered aisles of long out of date fashions, soaps that smelled like gas station washrooms and unstable looking press board future ready to be carted off to a waiting Halifax dorm by some over excited high school grad. It is however one day spent shopping that I remember, even now almost 25 years later.
It was the day I received my first hard cover notebook for journaling. Nothing special really. A little book, roughly 5x7 in size with a black and a red cover. Probably only 100 lined pages inside to capture whatever my thirteen year old heart could think to write. At the time it was actually quite a ubiquitous little book. These were the days long before retailers catered to the ever changing whimsy of tween and teen girls. Thus choices were very limited. Limited as in that was the only choice. Even though it was not the prettiest of items, it was special to me all the same.
That night I started the process of recording my mundane life. A process that I kept with on and off for roughly 20 years. Then for no particular reason I stopped. I'm not sure exactly why, or even exactly when, but I stopped.
There was something about recording the events of my small world that seemed to give me a tiny feeling of purpose. It made me feel I was doing something that had a bit of substance, unlike the rest of the activities in my day to day life. Although I didn't realize it at the time, I know now that I lost that feeling when I stopped.
Recently I've been struggling with a feeling of ... well, I'm not really sure. Emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, dullness ... So, as a result I'm trying to go outside my comfort zone. I'm trying to discover me; what I like; what makes me happy; what can make me feel like I have purpose. One of the things I do know is for a long time recording the events of my life, no matter how dull, how minor, how mundane, did bring me some happiness. It's time for me to try and restart that process and hopefully regain that feeling.
So, here's ponytails and capris. While it won't be as detailed as a personal journal, I hope to record my hopeful journey of changing my life a bit. We'll see.
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