I have a whole shelf of amazing books on journaling. Here are just a few books that I would flip through on a regular basis for inspiration. I’m pulling them back out to get inspired again. Read them, borrow them, buy them, share them….you won’t regret it!

I found this journal entry late last night and just found it hilarious. It was written about 2 weeks before I walked into the office at my investment banking job one day and quit abruptly to pursue my passion of painting and creating. It is a very telling entry just by the border I wrote at the top “rut….rut…..rut…..”

It reads “stayed home from work today…not feeling well. not sure if it is a virus or stress. funny thing is I didn’t call in sick or anything…no one seemed to notice.”

I am thankful that I realized that if I didn’t care enough to call in sick, and no one at work cared enough to check to see where I was then maybe it was time to move on. Once I started carting journals and ziplock bags full of crayons and markers onto corporate jets, my career in leveraged finance began to end.

On a lighter note, that day I also bought a monoxide detector (which detected no monoxide in our house) and received new MBT sneakers in the mail which are supposed to “firm your butt.”

I used to journal everyday. I filled my journals with drawings, hotel keys, excerpts from books I was reading, doodles, trinkets, phone numbers, photos….documenting every day, every detail of my life. I used composition notebooks and made the pages stronger with newspaper and paste resulting in journals stuffed to be inches thick. I stopped journaling abruptly a few weeks into my pregnancy in 2006. I’m still not quite sure what changed in me except for the awesome idea of motherhood. For years, I had this unexplained frantic need to remember everything….the amazing, the tragic, the simple, the complex, the ugly and the perfect. I call it “the storm, before the calm.”

There are lot of Sylvia Plath’s words throughout my notebooks. I love Plath’s unabridged journals ….they rest under my bed for when I can’t sleep, I can open and read them at random ….there are things she wrote that I couldn’t have said better myself. I have a unique curiosity about her because my great-grandmother took her own life in the same way Plath did. There is a lot of Johnny Cash and Frida Kahlo throughout. He was open about his mistakes in life and learned from them with humility. She was complex and full of contradictions….but never self pity.

I thought I’d post some journal pages every once in a while with some excerpts. Some are boring, some are funny, some are pretty….I’ll choose to leave the really personal ones out for now for the sake of other parties. I’m hoping revisiting them will inspire me to start journaling again….and maybe inspire others to start journaling too.

The above quote is from one of Frida’s journals: I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return. I was able to see many of her paintings in person in London at the Tate in June 2005. Among those included in the exhibition: The Bus, My Dress Hangs There, The Broken Column, and The Two Fridas. I spent 6 hours in the exhibition and didn’t want it to end.