Journal - by Darylynn Starr Rank
September, 2004

I teach a course called “Writing the Road Inside”. It’s about keeping a journal. So many people I know have always wanted to keep a journal for one of a million or so reasons. But they don’t – for a million or so reasons. So I designed a course to help them.

I’ve taught it several times and it’s been great fun and wonderfully fascinating. (There has to be something fascinating in a million or so reasons!)

But it was only when I was starting to write this column that I remembered something about my journal and me, and why I feel it can be such an extraordinarily important part of life.

Some background:

When I was young, I kept a journal, a diary really, one of those little books with a white (fake) leather cover, a lock and a tiny key, from the time I was able to write, really. I loved it. Depended on it. 

But I stopped writing in it when I was nineteen years old. Stopped writing entirely, actually.

Many years later I had to quit my job as a psychologist because of nightmarish back problems. The very first day I quit, I went home and started a journal. Thank goodness I did. It got me through a truly terrible time. 

I went from writing the journal to writing a novel about the future, the year 2613, in which the world has become ‘holistech’.  It has integrated an holistic approach to humanity, with technology. In other words, the profoundly human part of us exists fully, but is no longer in a battle with the technologies that surround us. A major example is the “Identity Source Computer”, an exact imprint replication of our brains, but way faster.

Writing this article, I realized that I’d explicitly explored the importance of journal writing even in my first work of ficition!  I don’t think I could put it better now. So, herewith, an excerpt from my book, “One Step Into Time”: 

“My journal has always been crucial to my well being… In severe moments I've even held it to my body, taking direct comfort from… the knowledge that my deepest self exists on its pages. 

“But…, one thing I've always wanted from it, whether that want has been fervently strong or just a humorously whispered wish, it has never been able to do. 

“It has never spoken back to me. 

“It has never answered my questions, evolved my process or identified my patterns… My journal has almost always been profoundly useful in helping me find my way since it holds the purest concrete reflection of my spirit that exists…  But it has never, by itself, accomplished any of it. 

“But my Identity Source Computer has. It talks back to me all the time. One day I pour thoughts into it. The next day it's evolved a step further, mirroring back the essence of what I'd said but hadn't seen.”

So okay, folks, my fantasy ideal computer doesn’t exist yet. But the fact of the matter is, now that I’ve spent years studying journals, teaching journal writing courses, and hearing from students about what journals really do for them – I’m pretty sure I was completely wrong about one thing. I think the journals we keep, here and now in the 21st century, talk back to us all the time! Journals can organize our thoughts, grapple with our hopes and problems, and find solutions, in unique and very, very powerful ways.

Take care all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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