I laid gaunt beneath the cement ceiling on the rigid bed frame covered by a thin bamboo mat. Cambodian KFC had wrecked my digestive system, and I slowly breathed through my nose to ward off nausea. A small fan buzzed in the corner, vainly fighting off the humidity. Hugged against my chest was a two day old copy of the New York Times. I can’t remember how it came into my possession. Perhaps my considerate homestay sister had kindly offered it to me as she had the American fast food that rendered me incapable of moving. Maybe I had purchased it with money saved by skipping a meal so that I could have something from the States after two months abroad. Whatever the case, it felt like God had personally handed it to me. I devoured it, hungry for something familiar. And now I cradled it with a single thought overriding my ailment: I wanted to write.
I wanted to write the worthwhile words like those I read within its pages. I wanted to write catalytic articles that changed the way people carried out their lives. I wanted to wield the mightier pen to cut down ignorance, apathy, and presumption. I wanted to pour out prose that couldn’t be contained.
But the thought that stopped me then, that I battle daily now, is that I could never be a writer.
In the books I’ve read about writing or essays on essays (the essayists love writing essays on writing essays), they do it every day. They sit down, some days full of zeal, other days bound to the chair to prevent them from fleeing, and write because something inside them must get out. It is this daily offering that gradually grows into the brilliant pieces of literature. When I had read this of Anne Lamott or Joan Didion, I knew I was destined to failure. I never write! Certainly not daily. I lack self-discipline and am infamous for my wretched time management. I mourned Lamott’s exhortation to write daily as the rich man did Christ’s. I could never be writer, I just didn’t have it in me.
I do not have words inside my soul desperate to get out. I do not have a persistent drive to put to paper thoughts regardless of if others read them. But what I do have is an ceaseless loquacity. I have very little thought life that is unshared with the unsuspecting bystander within earshot. Barista, receptionist, fellow-grocery-shopper, let me tell you I like your earrings and my personal history on lost and broken jewelry. I do not have welling words within, I have effusing conversation without. As such, I do not write daily, but I do talk constantly. I most often talk to God, and nearly every day I do so in my journal.
I have been keeping a journal for as long as I have been walking with Christ — longer even. I filled my first three subject spiral notebook, at the age of 12. The juvenile scrawling, increasingly indiscernible on the pages riffled and rubbed over time, holds both profound observations of self and life through the eyes of a pre-adolescent and all the angst more associated with the age. I used to look scornfully at the immature thoughts as sinful and silly. Now, I treasure these artifacts that show how far Christ has brought me since then and how present He was before I even knew Him. Now the yellowing leaves serve as a beacon of “before.” Before Jesus Christ saved me, I was depressed and suicidal. Before Jesus Christ saved me, I came undone at my peers’ every words. Before Jesus Christ saved me, I was “foolish, disobedient, led astray, a slave to various passions and pleasures, passing my days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating everyone else.” I love it now not for who I was but for who I am no longer.
It wasn’t a proper journal per se, more an anthology of poorly written poetry and dialogues between personifications of my emotions. Nearly 20 years before Inside Out debuted, my twelve-year-old self wrote scores of scenes of Joy arguing with Sadness while Anger, Fear, and Disgust razed my personality. Very little prose and nothing that constitutes an essay are in it. Only one poem was edited and revisited. Nothing of it has ever been made public. Merely admitting the journal’s existence is an exhumation, let alone exposing that frightened child to the observing world. I’ll keep her safe a while longer still.
It wasn’t until I became a Christian that I started to keep a journal that more resembled a diary. Yet rather than a nameless recipient or inanimate object receiving my thoughts, I gave my entries up as prayers to God. My journals are deep crying out to deep — but also the superficial, all bound in one. The first journal, started in 8th grade right after my conversion, is nearly as shameful as its predecessor. My soul may have been saved but much angst still lingered. My early prayers consisted of begging God to make my crush ask me to the dinner dance (he did not) or that I’d pass a math test I hadn’t studied for (which I did). Yet the childish letters also portray a sincerity of belief that explains why Christ tells us to have faith like a child. I never was taught that something was too small to pray for, and page after page I asked my Father for both the fit and the frivolous in full earnest that He heard and desired to do good for me.
It was in that same journal that I discovered how uncomfortable it was to write on the left page with my wrist resting across the metal coil and resolved this by turning the journal over so to always write on the right. Nearly twenty years later, though I’ve graduated to faux-leather faux-Moleskins that do not pose such a problem, I’ve nevertheless retained the ritual of flipping my journal with every new page.
Each page is another transcript, an ongoing dialogue with the One who rescued me. My journaling directly corresponds with how intimate my relationship is with God. If I stop speaking, or more often the case stop listening, then I’m left with little to record. During college, early in Justin and my relationship, was when my journaling nearly ceased. I thought at the time it reflected Justin taking on the role of journal. I didn’t need to process things on paper when I had this physical body to commune with. But in retrospect, I now know that I had allowed Justin to replace my journal in much graver ways. I conversed with God less the more I idolized Justin. When we abandoned ourselves to premarital sex, the ink ran dry. God brought us back, and after we married, God and my conversation renewed. But then it began to fade again. I reasoned at that time I journaled less because my church community took the place of my journal. I didn’t need to write down words to God when I could just talk about Him with the people around me. I applied that same reasoning to God’s Word. Why read what He had written in the confusing and sometimes awful-sounding Bible, when I could chat with others with words that sounded grand and were easier to swallow? When we moved out of that community and I was faced with new (but very old) thoughts, different (but very orthodox) beliefs, and the resounding Truth of scripture, my journaling erupted in a way as it never had before. It took four years to fill one journal during the period of ignoring God’s Word, and it took 6 months to fill the next one as I wrestled through scripture to understand more and more who God says He is and who He says we are. I’ve been filling a journal every sixth months since. The amount I journal has had so little to do with how much I wanted to say to God and so much more to do with how beautiful I saw Him to be. The more I behold God the more I want to do so, and the more we commune through the pages of my journals.
The first of these journals gained the title, “Primus libellus” taken from Latin class, in which our notebooks where we kept our translations, verb conjugations, and noun declensions were referred to in Latin as “libelli” or “little books.” Each of my subsequent journals bore a Roman numeral and “libellus" as its name. I stopped keeping track around duodeviginti (18) in the dark ages of college. Each libellus is a subsequent stone in the Ebenezer of my life sustained by God.
Even though I have been writing almost every day for almost two decades, I still never considered this “writing.” I had written off writing because of my lack training, discipline, and motivation, but sometime this past summer God connected the dots for me. He showed me that I had been crafting many an essay in the form of letters to Him. But I still resisted the notion that these writings could be for a wider audience than just God. Then this fall He had me stumble upon “The Art of the Personal Essay” an anthology of this singular form. I began to ruminate on the works of Plutarch, Loren Eisley, E. B. White, and others. I learned through this collection and Carl H. Klaus’ The Made-Up Self, Impersonation in the personal essay, that these pieces are carefully constructed to appear to be the transparent thoughts of the writer on a particular subject or experience. I was surprised to discover this was exactly what I had been writing for 15 years. Because each entry in my journals is a conversation with God about whatever circumstance or theology I am wrestling with or am passionate about, they are diligently self-examining and wander as any conversation with a friend or pensive chewing would. I have over 2 dozen volumes of personal essays.
But they are not at all Personal Essays. So much of my writing has been to God that even now as I type I keep hitting backspace three times to replace “You” with “God.” Within the pages of my journals, nothing is edited. I rarely and very poorly veil my innermost sinful thoughts, delusions of grandeur, or unfiltered self. How could I when the One to whom I speak easily sees right through it? Easily sees me, all of me, (and yet lavishes His love upon me because of Christ)! There’s no pretense in my conversation with God. There’s no trying to impress Him or arrange my thoughts or comb the thesaurus for smart-sounding words. My pen furiously flows with every thought I wish to share and wish to conceal from the One who created me. Raw, unintentional, unmetered these dialogues do not at all compose Personal Essays as Virginia Wolf or Montaigne prescribed. Understandably so, since the intended Audience has already read them, already known them before they were written.
When people, well, when I realized that I wasn’t joking when I said I wrote essays for fun, then I realized maybe I should write essays for real. My writing could indeed be for more than just God and me. Being bad at time management and self discipline were not life sentences, unchangeable facets of my personality, but excuses. So I made a plan. I blocked out 20 hours a week to write. I read essays and books about essays. I outline, edit, pitch, and preen essays. I have no idea what I am doing; I am writing.
I am writing personal essays for illuminating God’s self rather than my own. I am learning how to use my voice, the voice God has given me, to give Him the praise He deserves. I am seeking to be a conduit, a vessel, an arrow pointing to the One who truly deserves the attention and accolades while each moment fighting the desire to receive them myself. I am inching out on the tightrope between both extremes of self-effacement and self-exultation by taking my gaze off myself completely and fixing it on the One most beautiful.
Therefore, if I write, let me write to boast not in myself, but in Christ. If others read these words, let them taste and see that the Lord is good. If recognition follows, let His beauty and truth be what is recognized. This is my prayer whenever I sit down to write words for eyes other than God’s to see. This is my prayer every time I laugh out loud to my own joke and whenever I daydream about reading an essay I’ve written in The Best American Essays or The New Yorker. This is my prayer when I go two weeks without writing because I am poor at time management and self discipline. This is my prayer for this blog.
“Primus Libellus Digitus” is my attempt at a modern latin equivalent for my “first online journal.” The older posts, labeled “The Chronicles”, are as emblematic of a younger version of myself as those early analog journals. These latter posts are the refined (or at least edited once or twice) essays of my current press to be writer.
