I am slowly, but surely journaling my way through Susan M. Tiberghien’s “One Year to a Writing Life,” and wanted to share with you the first entry I wrote from one of her exercises. Typically, my journal entries tend not to be as eloquent and heart-felt as what I can accomplish writing on the computer, and this is only because my thought to typed-word ratio is so much better than my thought to written-word ratio. When I write by hand, my hand cramps up so fast, making the actual writing difficult and painful. However, this particular entry holds the same spirit my usual writing does, and I wanted to give you a peak into what I was feeling when I wrote it.
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11/10/11, 5:53 p.m., work
Today has been glum. It started raining in my last class this morning. The window was cracked open several inches like a gaping mouth. I peered through the glass and caught the faint drizzle of rain against the backdrop of a skinny tree branch. I sighed at the fact that I didn’t have a hood on my sweater or an umbrella. I can’t make myself remember to check the weather each morning before leaving for campus.
By the time I got to work, I’d accumulated a parking ticket and bad hair. I leaned towards the rearview mirror, stealing a few minutes of rest before going inside. A forest had sometime grown between and underneath my eyebrows. I rubbed the fuzz with my finger. I couldn’t go into work looking like that. It was a wordless testimony to how I’d let myself unravel, or at least fray, over the last few days. I dug around in places for a tweezer I knew I wouldn’t find. I was going to have to go in with a worm growing across my face.
Inside, the system was down, and the first thing I did was sulk with a piece of Dove chocolate. And, Bliss. I’d wanted to work on class assignments, but couldn’t because our backup system runs on a different username that doesn’t have the programs I’d need for it. My chest tightened. I spread my thumb and index finger over my clavicle, breathing in and out, in and out. Then, a mustard seed. That’s how I ended up relating it – that small surge of panic. It was a microscopic blip of easiness that released the tension knotted in my chest. I called it a mustard seed because of the premise of the mustard seed of faith. I felt one kernel of reassurance, and I fought to keep it there, to last me through the day. I needed it to last me through the rest of my assignments for the semester.
Right now, that mustard seed is fading in and out, threatening to topple over and stumble into anxiety. If I can just knock out a few things over the weekend, I’ll feel better, more prepared and stable.
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I look back on this entry and think about that window, a gaping mouth. I once imagined climbing through it in the middle of class and walking away. Where would I have gone? I liked to imagine it would’ve been like walking through the brick column in King’s Cross, that I would end up in the same world, but within a more magical realm of it. In a way, graduating was sort of like that, only life hasn’t become magical, and I realize it’s because of my perspective. I had the idea today that the only thing in my life that needed changing was how I looked at things, and that the pieces of my life I wish to be different would adapt to my altered perception of the world. This wall I find myself standing in front of, the stone blocks would sink in, fold onto each other, and reveal through an arched opening, a new world into which I could step, in which I could live, in which I could believe.
