1000 Journals

I have kept a journal my whole life. Sometimes writing every day. Sometimes weeks giving way to months where not a single word is written. Generally the happier I was, the less I tended to write. And what I wrote when I did was often whining and sniveling. Stuff I can't or won't look at these days.

Just upside down to how things are now. Writing creates happiness. Creates peace. Creates healing.

So when I spied a movie on Netflix called 1000 Journals, I had to watch it. It is the story of a man, known only as Someguy, who decides to create and send out 1000 blank journals into the world. Dropping some in phone booths, park benches, coffee shops and others being mailed across the world. Each is numbered and stamped with a website to which people can post which journal they have, where they are in the world and even upload images of the journal pages. The story is absolutely compelling to me as a writer. Each journal becoming a traveling window into the lives of whoever held it.

I love this idea. Have actually had a similar thought years ago and bought a journal. I am a sexual abuse survivor. That journey has been hard and I have learned so much. And I imagined what it might have meant to me to hear other women's stories about their own journeys along that land mind ridden path as I tried to navigate it. Writing my story and then being able to release it - let it go. What would it mean for someone to hold that small book that was the window to my healing, to the healing of many women? How that book would travel from survivor to survivor, hand to hand creating a bond between us that made us all collectively stronger and more whole.

I did not act on this then. But think perhaps I will.