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Discovering
Joy
by Tristine Rainer
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You are more likely to discover
the essence of your individuality by studying the unique
composition of your happiness as it appears in the diary
than you are by focusing on worries or disappointments.
Negative ways of thinking are often an internalized
punishing "parent" or other destructive mental
habits acquired during childhood. But to find what
brings you genuine happiness is to discover who you
really are. Marion Milner concluded from her diary
writing that "happiness not only needs no
justification, but that it is also the only Final test
of whether what I am doing is right for me."
Diarists are fortunate in
having a tool that allows them to make personal sense
out of all the platitudes, theories, philosophies, and
cultural conditioning about happiness. They have a means
of defining abstract ideas like happiness, love, and
freedom within the context of their individual lives.
Diarists discover happiness inductively; the evidence is
drawn from their feelings and experiences. Because the
diary is always becoming, because there is no goal or
end to it but only 'the ongoing process, diarists begin
to perceive their lives, as Milner further observed,
"not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my
preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and
growth of a purpose which I did not know." The
meaning of a life is discovered from the life itself;
and the ingredients of personal happiness are realized
as you record your unique experiences of it.
No one can claim that keeping a
diary will bring you happiness. Nevertheless, in reading
through many lifetime diaries I have observed how men
and women on very different paths have discovered
happiness for themselves and used the diary for that
purpose. Numerous diarists with unhappy childhoods have
altered their ways of seeing the world and even their
temperaments through diary work. The lifetime diaries of
the French writer H. F. Amiel, for example, trace a path
from guilt and self-condemnation to a growing maturity
and happiness. In his later years Amiel attested to the
journal's cathartic and curative powers: "The chief
utility of the journal intime is to
restore the integrity of the mind and the equilibrium of
the conscience, that is, inner health."
Inner health is what the
process of the New Diary is all about. It comes from the
happiness of an integrated life, which includes loss,
love, pain, pleasure, error, success, disappointment,
and joy. It comes from the ability to stay in touch will
your true feelings, needs, and desires within the rhythm
and movement of the ever-changing present, to be
alternately active or receptive as the tidal conditions
of life demand. It is found in the continuous excitement
of living experimentally, in accepting life itself as
the goal of life. It is a sense of intimacy with the
mysterious movement and process of life, a feeling of
"being life."
These attitudes are all
accessible through the process of keeping a diary. Yet
people often associate the content of diaries—and the
creative process generally—primarily with pain and
sorrow. Many diarists admit that they write only when
they are confused, unhappy, or full of self-pity. Some
journals even contain a disclaimer stating that the
writer is not really as unhappy as the book would
indicate, but that the journal gives a slanted
self-portrait. This distortion probably comes about from
a Western misconception about creativity as the product
of pain and frustration. The Eastern concept of
creativity is more inclusive. According to Lady Murasaki,
an eleventh-century Japanese diarist, one writes when
some experience "has moved him to an emotion so
passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his
heart. Again and again something in his own life or in
that around him will seem to the writer so important
that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion."
The creative emotion can be joyful as well as painful.
If your diary points out that
you seem to be caught in a negative frame of mind, you
might ask yourself if you tend to dismiss your
pleasurable experiences and concentrate on the painful
ones. You might try making a list of the elements in
your life you include in your diary and another list of
the elements you forget or neglect to include. Or you
might simply ask yourself in writing why you have a
tendency toward negativity and allow the answer to come
to you intuitively and spontaneously. You may find, like
the woman who wrote, "I have this urge not to let
myself come off in a positive way here," that the
mechanism of guilt makes you feel unworthy of appearing
happy to yourself.
Without eliminating other kinds
of diary work you can experiment with including positive
feelings in the diary. The easiest way to do this is to
wait until the next time you feel happy and then to go
to the diary with these feelings. Once you have
experienced the pleasure of writing out positive
feelings you will return to do it again and again. The
following sensual description was one woman's first
attempt to write out of positive emotions after years of
writing only negative entries:
As we walked to the fruit stand
at twilight, I was overcome with ecstasy. Each house had
a new charm and a story to tell. Colors seemed to have
been applied with a brush. At the stand each orange
demanded a caress. I wanted to rub each smooth mushroom
against my breast. The green and yellows of the squash,
the dark blue of the sky, the streak of crimson along
the horizon made me drunk with color and air and space.
Recording her elation made it
seem more real and consequently a more important part of
her life.
There is magic in this process.
By changing what you write, you begin to change how you
perceive yourself and therefore who you are.
Excerpted
from "The New
Diary, how to use a journal for self-guidance and expanded creativity"
(Tarcher/Putnam) 1978
Tristine Rainer,
Ph. D. is the author of Your Life as Story,
Discovering the "New Autobiography" and
Writing Memoir as Literature, published in hard
cover in 1997 by Tarcher/Penguin-Putnam and now
available in trade paperback. The book, which hit the L.A.Times
bestseller list, came out of Rainer's work over the past
twenty years studying autobiographic writing and
advising memoirists. Her earlier book The New Diary,
how to use a journal for self-guidance and expanded
creativity, has sold over 300,000 copies and is
considered the definitive work on contemporary diary
writing.
Rainer has taught
literature and writing in the English departments at
UCLA and Indiana University, was a founder and designer
of the UCLA Women's Studies program, and co-taught a
class for International College with her friend and
mentor Anais Nin. Rainer has published both fiction and
non-fiction, and has written and produced many two-hour
television movies for the major networks, often
dramatized from true life stories. One of her films for
CBS, "Games Mother Never Taught You" won first
place awards from the National Commission on Working
Women, the Museum of Television History, and from
American Women in Radio and Television; another CBS film
"Forbidden Nights" won the 1990 Jimmie award
from the Association of Asian Pacific American Artists.
Tristine Rainer is
presently Director of the Center for Autobiographic
Studies, 260 S. Lake Ave, #220, Pasadena, CA 91101, 818
754-8663, http://www.storyhelp.com. The Center is a
non-profit educational organization that encourages the
creation and preservation of diaries and memoirs. The
Center offers classes and an annual works-in-progress
retreat in Santa Barbara. Rainer is also Senior Editor
of First Person, a quarterly published by the
Center for Autobiographic Studies.
Tristine Rainer is
presently on the faculty of the USC Master's in
Professional Writing program and teaches in the UCLA
Extension Writer's program.
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