This blog post celebrates the launch of Give a Girl a Journal, a do-good initiative of Jamie Ridler Studios. Jamie has greatly inspired my creative life, and reignited my love of journaling.

Find out more about how you can support Jamie’s beautiful program to get journals into the hands of as many girls as possible, and empower them to use them. You can donate a journal, nominate a girl to receive a journal, and share your own journaling story.

When you give a girl a journal, you show her to her heart  #giveagirlajournal

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I don’t remember exactly when I started journaling. I was likely 8 or 9, and the idea of gathering my most private and secret thoughts behind a silver lock and key held mystery and wonder and possibility and delight.

My journaling was sporadic for many years, and sadly, those earliest journals didn’t survive the various cross-continental moves of my teens and twenties. But there was always a love of writing, and a knowing that through the simple act of taking pen to paper, I could find safety and home.

Recently, when I was going through an old box, I discovered a solitary sheet of lined paper, filled double-sided with a year-in-review entry from 1980. On it, I had detailed the ups and downs with my best friend, how I’d placed in the most recent dance competitions. And in the most important, introductory paragraph, I announced that on Valentine’s Day, I got my period for the first time.

One of my journal boxes

Also in that box (and another) was a collection of journals spanning the past 20 years or so, when my journaling practice became more steady. I have written through divorce. Freedom and new beginnings. Love, need, desire and heartache. Career transitions and disappointments. Marriage (again). Pregnancy, birth and the first year of my daughter’s life. My Dad’s illness and death.

I felt it was time to go through them and decide which I would keep.

It’s a tender thing, reading through old journals and re-living many of the defining moments of your life. I wanted both to honor the past, and be willing to release what was no longer serving me. How to choose?

It wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. Most decisions were quick, intuitive. It was a little like the process that Marie Kondo describes in her book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. She says to take each item in your hand and ask, “Does it spark joy?” And if the answer is no, you don’t hang onto it.

Of course with written memories there are different questions:

• Does this make me feel stuck in the energy of the past?
• Does it reflect and serve who I am today?
• Is this something I will want to reflect on again?
• Might I someday wish to pass this along?

Sometimes there’s no need to ask anything.

From my collection, I’ve kept a half dozen or so. They don’t all spark joy but they ALL spark love and gratitude.

As for the rest, I thanked them for their value in helping me sort through and process, took their wisdom into my heart, and gently let them go.

In mid-life, I’ve come to a creative renaissance of sorts. Inspired by several teachers and coaches, including Jamie Ridler of Jamie Ridler Studios, I’ve begun to simultaneously keep multiple dedicated journals, including a “disposable” exercise book for morning pages, a collage journal, an altered book for my first tentative steps into art journaling, and a journal where I’ve been planning the upcoming relaunch of my blog and business, GoGreenInside^®, as a place where midlife women can be supported in creating their own ‘vibrantly alive best of their life.’

This current collection of journals that I’m actively working in is getting close to the size of the ones I’ve recently let go of. How awesome is that 🙂

I will keep journaling. To Explore. Understand. Grieve. Surrender. Celebrate. Invite. Play.

I will write to honor the little girl, hold out arms to the parts of myself, dance towards wholeness.  To come home, again and again.