Five Minute Friday : Write

It's Five Minute Friday. Where everyone writes for five, unedited minutes all on the same prompt. This week, that prompt is the challenge itself, the dare if you will.  Lisa Jo has been encouraging honest writing and yeah baby...that is scary stuff. 

This week’s prompt is “WRITE.”

Here Goes.

I’ve been writing since I was a little girl. I had a diary, as most young girls do, and faithfully wrote in it whenever I felt I had something I wanted to share with myself. I used it as a sounding board. Sometimes I would go back to change my thoughts to what seemed more appropriate even though the first draft was the most honest.

As I grew up I graduated from a diary to a journal.  A journal sounded more mature than a diary, yet it functioned the same way. The writing it contained certainly had more mature themes though. I started the journal in my early twenties. The first few pages began with the dating of my husband then moved on to having our children and just doing life. I put the journal aside for many years but recently discovered it again in a box after a move. When I found it and began to flip through the pages, I discovered  that life seemed to have gotten in the way of writing.  When my pages begin to fill with the painful words of a rough marriage, my pen stopped capturing the moments. Later entries were dated sometimes more than a decade apart and I noticed I tried to fill in the gaps of what happened during those exiles, only to be halted once again. Were the memories too painful or was I afraid I would lose the reality of what really happened? I'm not sure.

I  remember I tried to write what was happening in my life, but every time I felt held back, feeling as if the gap in between would forever be forgotten if I didn’t put them on paper before moving on. I put restraints on writing my current life in order to try and capture the pain I went through in my early years.  I guess I wanted to see the progression to a happy ending.  Instead, I’ve lost those little details that happened. Now the past details are foggy and my journal pages incomplete.

So where do I go from here? Do I try to recall the past or should I just write? Can I do both?

Stop.

I'm joining Lisa Jo Baker and tons of other brave writers for Five Minute Friday.