Permission to Throw Away Old Journals

You've done the growth... now live your life!

Last night I went through a whole bin of journals that I furiously filled from 2019 through Covid until 2023. I wrote like my life depended on it (excuse the cliche') but apparently it did. I was working out who I was in a house I bought in July 2020. I thought my assignment in buying this house was to live the American dream but instead, I see now through the magnitude of my outpouring of my heart onto these pages, it was to find some semblance of inner peace. To discover my soul (if that sounds too heady, I literally did a remote soul retrieval and felt my heart light on fire…), and to also work through some conditioned beliefs I had on romance, parenting and myself as a writer.

Today, I am tossing all these exhibits of the past because I am turning a new corner in my life moving in with my beloved, into a house that is fully furnished. I am vetting to the bone, as is he, and we are enjoying sending each other texts from our currently separate abodes of unrooted artifacts of our past that we are now marveling we kept this long.

We keep shit until we realized we have moved on from the lessons, life path, journey, and then we can set ourselves free by a’ la dumpster trip.

Ditch that shit. You learned the lesson and now you have permission to live and bask in the results.

I filled 30 journals and am reaping the benefits of the all the self analysis and paralysis. We get to land at a juncture that points to a sunrise. I know that sounds corny, but I spent yesterday in a mood of self-pity until I opened that bin of journals and realized my life is on cloud 9. I felt sorry for, and proud of, my old self in one swoop. What work I did, and what an anxious thing I was! Blame it on a quarantine, but I was listing all my meals, and if I wrote down popcorn, later I would come back and write more next to it, and circle it. I did gain the Covid 15, but I also came out of that experience understanding gluten, is not my friend and I became a vegetarian.

So again, frantic obsessive writing can eventually reveal the parts of you that no longer want to be anxious. I don’t write down anything I eat anymore because I eat what makes my body feel good for who I am today. I am not anxious about it or tracking it. And if I start to do that shit, it means something within me feels out of balance or there is some area of my life I am not self-honoring.

I saw my neighbor this morning as I was hauling out of my place yet another box of crap for the dumpster. Dresses and shirts I have not worn in 3 years or when I do I feel yuck in them. I asked her if she wanted them.

“I am pairing down myself,” she said. This is a woman who I have talked with about her search for love, her divorce, and her desire to one day live in Montana.

“I am done searching for myself,” I said to her.

She nodded. “Sister, I feel you.”

I mean, I guess I am for now. One day, the next level of progression will happen and I will look back either at the next bin of journals (although I do about one every six months now versus then which was one every two months) or I will be amused at how I finally understood life is a progression and there is literally nothing we can do about it aside from stagnate.

When my partner and I met, we spent a lot of our early romance on the beach. Sadly in parts of Malibu and on the PCH that are gone, but the resonance lives on because now we are moving into a furnished beach house. A bucket list for both of us we realized during our courtship.

While I thought I would be nervous or scared of living with someone for the first time in 13 years aside from my children, I am not. The journals explain why. I was working out the Chris, Mitch, Joe and Wills of my life. I was removing any hesitation as to why these men didn’t work out, or worse, why I thought they should have for longer than necessary. Each time I did a renovation to the house, or ditched a situationship, I went back into those journals and asked myself why I was so independent and yet so desperately co-dependent on men who didn’t deserve me.

I found answers for myself, and also in prayer with God, who I conversed with often in the journals because it was Covid and no one else was talking to me. Remember those days when you would go long stretches with only yourself? I was forced out of the swirl and whirl of my over achieving life.

Then there was the writing that transpired and how that is coming about now to be recognized and healed.

We have to heal as writers and we do so by getting everything out of our way we possibly can so we can lean into the dream. While once I thought about manifesting a beach house with a lover, I didn’t know the path at all. But I went through all the no thank yous. With writing, I can do the same. What is your writing beach house? For me, it’s long lines of readers around the Barnes and Noble, blocks away, to meet me and have me sign their book because I touched them deeply with my lessons and teachings on permission. But I don’t know the path there except as Byron Katy would say, “the work.” She invites her followers to an invitation for inquiry and I absolutely love what she has to say:

“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts I suffered, but when I didn’t believe them I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always. And I invite you not to believe me.”

The work is the work free from suffering. Here, and in every book I don’t want to write, but desperately do.

Just like every date I went on and didn’t want to until I found the love of my life.

Today a client asked my why I was waiting to publish my book on Permission.

“Who are you waiting to be validated by?” she asked me, poking at my ego.

I wanted to simultaneously cry and thank her for looking into the conflict that has been in the depth of my soul for the last year.

I keep hearing people saying permission in the news, interviews, mainly celebrities (because that is who we see quotes from often) and having this feeling like I am running out of time to publish a book I believe in because someone else is going to beat me to the punch. Someone more famous than me with more followers, and a bigger Substack, who will grace all the bookstore windows and airport book shelves. The truth is, if someone more famous or connected than me has written a book on permission, nothing in my power will get me as famous or followed as I need to be to justify a agent or a publisher picking up my book.

The issue is, when I don’t do more for the book, and believe in how excited the concepts make me, I think I am lazy and might as well not do anything anyway.

I fall into this complete fallacy that I am already a failure.

Here I am, the person acutely hearing permission talked about everywhere and I can’t pull myself up by the bootstraps and publish a book already written about it. Why?

I have no fucking clue. I am confused. And that is wild coming from a book coach who would have zero confusion about any client who I believe should publish a book that is their dream and have a ball doing it. See, my last book on sexual abuse was a platform I tried to get behind because I thought it was a God given gift to share my story and when it got out to hardly anyone, I kind of assumed that is what every book would do. But the truth is, we get clogged when we don’t move forward and try something out.

Then there is money. What it would cost to publish a book about permission and how much I want to invest in something I believe in, or I could down and dirty it, and just get it done on Kindle and then maybe people will find it.

Can you believe how much whining I am doing, on a column that you purposely received in your in box and subscribed to?

And I slightly digress but I don’t. Because what I realize in the last 24 hours that I will share with you is that once I saw those journals, simultaneously with my client asking me what kind of impact I want to have with my books, I understood finding the person to love and move in with eliminated a long confused journey of searching. I can be happy and joyful and secure in romance. It’s finally time to pull the weeds up from under writing, roll up my sleeves and get serious about a love I have had since I was a child.

Writing.