MOLESKINE NOTES ENTRY: "From the trash can to the bookshelf"

I snuck in the back door as quietly as I dared.

Setting my purse down carefully on the kitchen floor, I reached into the big black trash bag near the back wall. Forcing my hand through the leftovers--bits of gristle, pieces of wilted lettuce, used coffee grinds--I felt around for the crumpled pieces and fragments of paper I knew were in amongst the garbage.

When I found them, I pulled them out like a treasure, flattened them as best as I could, clutched them carefully to myself, picked my purse up from the floor, and crept slowly back towards the door.

This was an ongoing ritual for me nearly every night from elementary school until I finally ran away from home as a teenager. I was an avid journal keeper, a fact that my extremely conservative and fundamentalist Christian family couldn't stand. They regularly went through my journals and ripped out the "inappropriate parts." It could be a section on my doubts of God's existence, or my bemoaning a recent movie I wasn't allowed to see. Sometimes it was my fantasizing about my future as an independent thinker, or the longing with which I looked at the make-up section at my local drugstore. Whatever they deemed not worthy of a "good Christian girl," they destroyed.

  As I grew older, and wiser, I started keeping two journals. One, the version that they read and ripped. (I admit to sometimes writing things just for the reaction.) Another, the one that was on me at all times, a journal they didn't even know existed.

It's no surprise, then, that to this day I value journals. From lined and unlined to leather-bound and fabric covered, I love blank books (and the idea of blank books). I collect them as some women collect shoes. Their very potential thrills me—all this space waiting to be filled with words that won't be discovered and destroyed.

  When a friend introduced me to Moleskine, about a year ago, I realized I'd discovered the journal I'd always been looking for. I think I caught my breath as I carefully took off the band and reverently turned the pages. It was a real journal. The one I'd always wished I could find.

  Moleskine honors my story and my life. They craft the pages with care, and they treat my words as if they matter. When I sit in a coffee shop or on a bench at the beach, people often ask me what I'm writing. "That's a beautiful journal," they say. I smile, and nod, and inside, something is very proud.

"Take that!" I say inside myself to the family of origin I haven't seen or spoken with in over a decade.

  I buy Moleskines every few months, whether I need them or not. I buy the Van Gogh green ones, the small ones, the blank ones, the lined ones—I have a shelf full of them, as if they are a treasure. And they are a treasure.

Recently I published my first book. I'm happy to say that there was nothing left or ripped out of it… It is my words, and my story, in all of its honest, sacred truth. I wrote much of it in my first moleskine. The words poured out of me, and found a safe place among the pages. I'm happy to say they're all still there.

Renee Altson
author of  Stumbling Toward Faith  (Zondervan, Harper Collins 2004)
avid Moleskine user,  lover of all things cheese.
Visit her site.

A MOLESKINE NOTES ESSAY SERIES ENTRY. This is the last entry in the series. Thanks for your participation.

Image: "Lettres de Lou" by Arsian @ Moleskinerie/FLICKR.
© All rights reserved. Used with permission. Merci!

Get out, have a life - and write about it! Enjoy the weekend everyone. See you on Monday!

Comments

[drumrider]

Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. So many similarities to my own fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about writing and Moleskine. My own shelf of carefully lined up Moleskines, waiting to be filled with the words of my heart that are no longer censored, catches my eye... and I am smiling.

[Alia]

I, too, grew up unable to claim the simple privacy of a journal. I left notes at the bottom of my sock drawer, "So, you don't go through my things?" Within a day, I was being punished for my insolence. I knew without testing it that I could not write for myself. Reading _1984_ in high school, I knew immediately that the protagonist's journal would never be safe, no matter how he tried to mark it with hairs and motes of dust. "No no no," I thought. "Never record anything, ever, that you wouldn't scream from atop the dinner table, or recite naked in the middle of the street! Never!" It's taken a long time to recover from the iron clad self-censoring urge, to establish the ownership of my own, however ridiculous, meandering thoughts.

Now grown, I, too, collect blank books. Sometimes I pet them, these objects too precious for the wood pulp and cotton thread that made them.

[bobbie]

i too am grateful for those moleskine journals renee. they led you to publish 'stumbling toward faith' and it changed my life!

[mikshir]

What an incredibly moving essay. I know people who keep or have kept a second private journal, including myself but for entirely mundane reasons compared to Renee's.

[renee]

these are beautiful comments, I am honored to share in a little bit of your stories.