Mom Said I Was Too Serious

I gave away my books on the enneagram when I was in the expressive arts training, learning not to turn to prescribed systems of meaning. But before I did, unfortunately, I photocopied one important page and taped it into my journal. Every once in awhile, I come across it again and say, "oh how true" and copy it again and tape it into my current journal. This just happened, yet again.  At the bottom of the photocopy I've written, "How many times am I going to tape this in my journal?"

It's about "Fours," the "tragic romantics" of the enneagram and how they need to "focus on something beyond their feelings and their imaginations."  The line that always gets me is about how the "Healthy Four" has "found the courage to act without reference to their feelings and have thus freed themselves from the relentless tug of self-absorption." What could be more self-absorbing than a project which requires reading back over old journals? For a Four, could there be anything worse?

There is, however, a saving grace. Telling people about the Mortified show usually leads to them telling me their story. One woman told me she misses writing, that she hasn't kept a diary since her father read hers twenty years ago. Another told me how she too lost all her friends in a sudden turn of the popular tide. And at my little Easter party here yesterday, Jen brought some of her actual archives from age 12, including the first time she realized something remarkable was happening, worth writing about, and ran to get her special pen. The entry began, "Journal, I have a lot of questions to ask myself," and then went on for several pages describing the behavior of a covey of quail- how they moved and hid and ran and flew. I could hear the marriage of budding consciousness with the reaching for language to describe what was happening out there.

This is actually how expressive arts therapy does work- to ask a question from within, and then, instead of circling endlessly in the interior darkness, to look out, and see what the world has to say, or show.

I don't know how to make this funny. I would like it to be funny. Once, a woman in Storymakers told me, "You don't always have to be funny." I will try an experiment: that's my question for myself- how to make it funny. And I will look out to the world and see what it has to show me. It doesn't hurt that the Bridgetown comedy festival starts Thursday.

What did you want when you were 12? What obsessed you at 15? What were you on the brink of at 17? Do you know? Do you remember? If you have your teen diaries, do they surprise you?