the impact of writing it down

i write things down.  i make lists and have an obsession with stationary and pens.  i use an old fashioned monthly calendar/planner and probably always will. i love hand-written letters - both writing them and receiving them...i love the personal intimacy of them, the thought and the effort that goes into putting words on paper...knowing that the writer's hands touched the paper, that they took the time to not just push a "send" button but to put it in the mail.

anyway, about the writing things down...i keep my planners...i love to look back through them and see what happened over the course of the year; where i went, what i did, who i saw...a general play-by-play of the year's events.  the funny thing is...as i look back, i consistently see the truly big events, those i was easily most impacted by, are barely mentioned if at all.  it's like i subconsciously tried to erase them from memory by not even writing them down in the first place...perhaps i'm too busy at those times, or too afraid to put the event into words, or too hurt to care, or too ashamed of what someone might think if they ever read it, or too excited and afraid of somehow ruining the moment by putting it into words...i'm honestly not sure.  i just know that as i read through years past, the most monumental moments...losing carter, mom getting sick, my divorce, moving, meeting people who had huge impacts on my life, traveling, losing gran, this year's break-up...are each only marked by a simple date or in some cases, not at all...no details, nothing left to remind me more than the memories already do.  they are there on those pages in the abundance of blankness that stares back at me from those stretches of time...the pages i skip over, flip quickly past likely hoping to keep from reliving the moments that kept my thoughts trapped inside my head, inside my heart.  kind of a self-preservation method i suppose.

i've thought a lot about this year...wished it would hurry up and pass already, looked back on it with dismay, wondered how i survived it, and lastly...have been thankful for it.  so much good has come from those blank pages.  while i am nowhere near where i thought i'd be this time last year, i am right where i'm supposed to be at this moment.  there are things i still miss, things i think of, things i wish that were different...but, i finally have made peace with it all.  and...as i read through 2011...i realize that for each blank memory, there are many more that made their way onto the pages...lunches with friends, evenings out, weddings, birthday parties, moments with morgan, first days of school, skating and ballet, the surprise of baby guinea pigs, the addition of a puppy, meetings and events, and the simple day to day activities that make up our life.