Welcome to The Registry, where writers recommend things in their lives that have impacted their queer experience. Check out more here.
I’m not entirely sure when I started keeping a journal consistently, but it began sometime around fifth grade; my early entries chronicled whose house we rode our bikes to, then which boy I had a crush on, then which movie I saw with my friends on Saturday night. I kept a detailed list of my day-to-day preteen life, and as I got older, entries revealed more reflection and occasional distress. My feelings grew more intense, each entry heavy with teen angst scribbled in my loopy lefthand script. Sometimes I just couldn’t believe how a day could be so beautiful, the grass so cool and spongy beneath my feet. On other days I felt empty. Would I ever find love? What did my future hold? Why couldn’t I be skinny in hip-hugger jeans like Britney Spears?
Writing in my journal became a ritual, one that made it feel like I could wield some control over the direction of my life. I usually wrote before bed, candles lit, Enya’s celtic laments echoing around me. If I was bursting to share something I would race home to pull the notebook from my nightstand drawer. I amassed piles of journals; they traveled with me, friends bought me new ones for my birthdays, and I pored over the intricate covers at Borders in the mall. I often tucked mementos into their pages: ticket stubs, poems written on napkins, notes passed in class.
Everything I thought or did or dreamed or wished for was documented in a journal. Mostly, writing was a way to exhale the day and process my erratic teenage emotions. The pages were filled with unanswered questions that explored my insecurities or broader questions about the world. “Are people inherently cruel,” I wondered after September 11th, and again when a girl approached my locker and called me a slut. Journaling allowed me to be my own confidant.
My first year of college chronicled the loneliness of living in a dorm with strangers, then the minutiae of smoke-filled house parties, and drunken hookups with sweaty boys. I detailed the hazing rituals I endured when I pledged a sorority, and wrote about the transformative friendships I made there. I wrote about calling my mom crying when I got my first C on a paper, and later, how I made an A in that class.
By sophomore year, my journal radiated much more confidence. I was comfortable living in a new city, I had a group of friends, and I was looking forward to studying abroad the following semester. But still, I wrote, something was missing.
Then I met Sam.
I was 19 years old when I knew for certain that I had feelings for a girl, yet every night I sat in my dorm room and wrote around the truth. I wasn’t scared that anyone would read it; I was scared that writing down my feelings would make them real. This happened back in 2004, when popular TV, music, and films were still profoundly heteronormative. There were no bisexual rappers, trans YouTube stars, or #loveislove and #lovewins hashtags trending on social media (there was no YouTube or social media). I felt completely isolated, even at my urban liberal arts college, where nearly every boy on my co-ed floor was gay. Sure, my friends were open-minded and accepting, but I didn’t feel like I could tell them. Instead, I felt shame for hiding my secret.
Finally, on my last night in my dorm at the end of the semester, when all of my suitemates had already gone home for the holidays, I turned to my journal at 2 AM and wrote the truth. “The point of having a journal is to write my innermost thoughts that I cannot share with the world, so when I refuse to write something in my journal I know that I can’t even admit what it is to myself,” I wrote. “I have been refusing to take note of something for a few weeks now.” I went on to describe my feelings for Sam, what it felt like to kiss her for the first time — a drunken disaster during which I am mortified to admit that I cried — and the burn of shame that filled me every day for lying to my friends. Afterwards, I wrote, “Wow. It’s out. I feel a little lighter. But only the tiniest bit.”
Reading that entry takes me right back to that tiny little dorm room, the cold winter air whispering in through my window, my clothing strewn about, my bags half packed. “From here I know nothing. All I know is that life can really fuck with you sometimes,” I wrote. Finally, my journal had become a place where I could explore those new and terrifying feelings. That entry opened the floodgates, and I was able to admit everything I was feeling in an attempt to make sense of it all.
Though I’d spent my adolescence keeping journals — recording everything from the exciting to the mundane — it took this experience to help me make the leap from trusting myself to trusting my family and friends. I found my voice by writing in my journal, and it helped me navigate my fears surrounding my sexuality and initiate real-life conversations about it.
Moraya Seeger DeGeare, a therapist and co-founder of BFF Therapy, a counseling center in Beacon, New York, stresses the importance of keeping creative outlets in everyday life, but especially in identity development. “By journaling, a part of you is making it more real by taking it out of your mind and forcing you to organize your thoughts in a very simple way,” she says. “You’re creating fresh pathways to those thoughts and giving them validation.”
When I finally let myself use my journal to explore what I was feeling for Sam, and write about the shame and the stigma of my experience, it allowed me to move away from the paralysis that accompanied this radical shift in my identity. Writing in my journal allowed me to get words and feelings out of my head, which, in turn, helped me find the language to navigate this period in my life. Once I had the words, I was able to face the fear of telling my friends, and many months later, my family, too.
“Even when journaling is painful, or something that might not be comforting — like negative self-talk — you are at least taking it out of this solo space in your mind that can loop, twist, and attach fear to it,” explains Moraya. “As you create with your emotions it gives it real form.”
I told Moraya about what it felt like all those years ago to write in my journal and avoid the topic of my feelings for Sam. “You can have a code in your journal if it’s too scary and you can’t write that word yet,” she tells her clients. In this way, even in our journals, in our own words, we can still face our truths in our own time. “I’ve had people write it down and burn it,” she tells me, reminding me that there are no rules when it comes to finding a creative outlet for your feelings. She and her partner at BFF Therapy, Jaimee Arnoff, ask their clients in every session, “How are you getting this out outside of our session?”
I know with absolute certainty that journaling helped me overcome the fear that accompanied my initial feelings for Sam. Having a place to explore my feelings and create a language for my emotions stripped my fear of its power, allowing me to transform from a girl desperate to hide into a woman secure in her voice, her identity, and her love.
Many of Moraya’s clients are queer. “Some of them are working on discovering sexuality and coming out, even much later in life, and for others, that discovery was years before I met them. A part of the work in therapy is talking about those first attractions.” For some clients, she says, “We can go back to early journals together and see how pronouns had been interchangeable, and even handwriting can evolve as they refer to themselves with different pronouns.” Whatever we’re facing in our lives, journaling creates a safe space to explore language for different stages of our lives, whether we’re confronting our sexuality or our gender for the first time, or simply trying our best to live as our authentic selves. Words have power, and journaling can help us to own our stories.
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