My Journal

I have a journal. Or a diary, if that's what you prefer to call it. I love reading old entries and laughing at myself, realizing that I was worried over nothing. It's also just nice to have a reminder about how I felt about something important, right when it happened. What I hate to admit, however, is that 90% of my journal entries have been about a guy. I actually went through the other day and counted how many entries I had written that didn't mention a guy once. I don't even want to say the number; it's embarrassing. This makes me feel like a pathetic, boy-crazy 13-year-old. If someone is actually interested in reading my journal after I'm dead, they are going to think I spent all my time chasing boys and recovering from break-ups. They will think that I had nothing to say about world issues or human rights or spirituality or anything else important-sounding. I don't think this is the case in my everyday life though. Consciously, I'm pretty sure I don't worry all that much about relationships (at least not anymore)...it's just that when I sit down to write my thoughts, that's all that comes to mind. I know it seems silly that I should even care what others might think of what I'm writing in my journal; after all, it's for me, and not for someone else. I guess I just wish I had something more deep and meaningful to write than "Why hasn't he called me back?!"

So, I was really excited when I came to this passage in the book I'm reading: "And then I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees...These Cambodians had suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other--genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people die and corpses were fed to sharks--what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering? 'But don't you know,' Deborah reported to me, 'what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?' It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but when we were separated on different boats, he took up with my cousin. Now he's married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can't stop thinking about him. And I don't know what to do...This is what we are all like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all..."

I guess it's not just me then.