Write It Down!

Sharpening Body, Mind, Soul, and Heart

Today, April 17, 2019, marks the completed 33 Day Keeping My Diary Challenge posted on Instagram and Off the Hooks FB page. I’m excited about the completion of the challenge and thankful for many diary keepers joining the challenge.

I love a challenge. A challenge

• moves me out of my comfort zone,
• gives me a sense of completion,
• helps me feel connected to a larger purpose
• offers me the opportunity to learn about myself
• stretches me, literally when I participate in the 30-day Yoga Challenge I’m stretched
• and most of all a challenge turns my fear into enthusiasm, victory because I pushed myself out of my comfort zone.

I love keeping a diary: A diary

• offers a moment of introspection and reflection,
• propels me to be honest with myself
• stuff happens, when I write it down
• private bits of my mind become “an erratic assemblage with meaning”
• private writing is uninhabited, unscripted, unapologetic

Therefore, I created the Keeping My Diary Challenge, which sharpens the body, mind, heart, and soul. Each day offered a prompt that encouraged diarists to think about self, others, and the world around them. The prompts were a continuous loop with self-examination asking about your favorite season then your life as a season to the season of life you are now experiencing. The challenge asked participants to write letters to others.

I know keeping a diary demands commitment as sometimes you just don’t want to come to the page; therefore Day 11 and Day 22 were check-in days. The prompts asked how’s it going? It’s important when keeping a diary to remember, that some days will be forgotten, and those moments will not have had a place in the diary but it’s okay.

On Day 19, I, Angela, felt as though I needed to put a face to the prompts. As a result, I created a Vlog. My first, it was a stretch. Watch and Listen.

In response to the Vlog, a participant on Instagram (IG) posted that she was being challenged in all the right ways. “I haven’t been journaling…but I want to go back and actually write through your posts, not just think about them.”

Her response also speaks to many of us who keep a diary, notebook, or journal. Keeping a diary, coming to the page daily is not an easy task. Kathleen Collins explains it best in “Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary.” She wrote: “…, life takes over and the diary recedes. Then I feel in me a kind of determination to soak up life. I run away from these notes and make only cursory remarks” (52). One of her fleeting remarks resonates with @elizaosborn’s comment: “I don’t write often these days—not here, not in these pages. I am abstracted, in limbo, hanging on by threads. But it is difficult to speak about this limbo, to describe it. The journey is too personal to write about…” (53). When we come to these places in which we don’t want to write, I call that silence in the diary. Sometimes words do not come and you simply can’t force it, thus a blank page becomes silence.

On Day 32 it was important to ask participants what they learned about themselves during this 33-day challenge?

My aunt actually began keeping her diary on the FB page. She didn’t start on day one but by day 32, she’d realized the importance of writing it down, whatever needed to be displaced from the mind to the page.

Here’s what she wrote:

The idea for the challenge was to get you to the page. The prompts are ideal for beginners, occasional scribblers, and seasoned diary keepers.

Below is the 33 Day Keeping My Dairy Challenge, if you’d like to take the challenge, KeepingMyDairyChallengebyOfftheHooks

I pray God’s best life for you.

Until next time,

Angela