The Writer’s Digest website gives a weekly writing prompt as an idea starter. Here’s the one for this week, with my attempted response. I’m going to try to address these here when the mood strikes. This one in particular caught my attention.

Writing Prompt for 6/7/2005:

Read through old diaries and journals to relive your memories. Nostalgia can get your pen moving.

My Response:

First of all, I must comment on how timely this writing prompt is. Coincidentally, I actually DID just take out old journals to read them this past weekend, and it had absolutely nothing to do with this prompt, which I didn’t see until today. Since I was starting this blog, I wanted to revisit some of the things I used to write about. I hadn’t read those journals in YEARS! It was really fascinating to see how much some things about myself have changed and how much others have stayed exactly the same.

I wrote about everything… random daily events, friendships, hurts, frustrations, insecurities, crushes, how much I missed my college friends after graduation (although in hindsight I had no reason to as I’ve kept in touch with nearly all of those to whom I was closest), a travelogue of my summer in Europe, and meeting Kent. Toward the end I wrote exclusively about Kent and I really started to sound like a broken record because everything was wonderful and I was falling in love. The last entry was when he proposed, which was appropriate, I think. I suppose there was no need to continue writing once I had achieved that level of happiness. I never journaled again after that, until now. Although this is a lot different, and broader, than what I wrote about back then. It is mostly a vehicle to keep me writing regularly about things that are important to me, and even about things that are not so important.

The nostalgia component was so much fun, too. I wrote about things I had forgotten… they would be memories lost forever had I not documented them. The journal also traveled with me during my summer in Europe. I spent that summer after college mostly in Spain, but backpacked solo through Europe for 3 weeks. One of my favorite memories from that trip was the prearranged meeting atop the Arc d’Triomphe in Paris at high noon with friends who were traveling on a slightly different schedule. We had no plan other than the meeting date and location, and spent a couple of days exploring that city together before we went on our respective ways. I also had some scary experiences with strangers… one in particular that really frightened me. There is some danger in traveling alone as a female in countries where you don’t speak the language, but I’m a smart girl who wasted no time in removing myself from problem situations.