Beginnings: Why I Started Project M

This is my first blog post ever, edited. Enjoy!

This project was born out of two rather unremarkable events in my life.

The first was a casual conversation with my seventeen-year-old sister Maggie.  We are both life-long, devoted journallers, and we were talking about our journal-writing over lunch one afternoon at my house, when she asked me in all earnestness, “Is there anything left to write about in your journal after you get married?”

For a moment I was staggered and I just looked at her in dumb, wide-eyed silence.  Anything left to write about? My journaling life had exploded in the last four years since my wedding day. I almost felt as though married life was when things actually started happening in my life: it was when I actually started to become something that resembled my Real Self.  The things that I’d experienced in the last four years made my teenage years look like a low-budget edutainment program in comparison.

Since being married, I had for the first time learned how to truly love, I’d begun to learn about myself exponentially, and I’d actually started doing things.  Real things.  I learned to take care of myself, I travelled to new continents, I built surprising new relationships and encountered whole new philosophies of life.  The oceanic depth of my relationships now made all former relationships look like mere puddles in comparison.

I couldn’t believe her question.  Anything left to write about after you get married?

But then I realized there was nothing silly about her question at all. I had been prone to the same illusions when I was her age.  Like most teenagers, I too had been under the impression that the high school years constituted the most turbulent and interesting period in a person’s life. I too had felt instinctively that life — real, invigorating life — ended after marriage.  That’s why I was so reluctant to get married in the first place.

In fact, I had mulled over the issue of journaling-after-marriage myself before the day actually arrived.   I had decided I might as well give up on journal writing after the wedding.  What would I have to say? “Dear Diary: I continued to raise our children today.”  Snore. Besides, it might be awkward writing in a journal every night while my new husband waited impatiently beside me in bed. I  might as well just go straight to sleep with him.

Of course, this all turned out to be nonsense.

When the wedding day arrived, I decided I could at least write about the last twenty-four hours — they have been pretty eventful. And then I figured it would also be worthwhile to write about the honeymoon, which was pretty exciting. And then there was settling into our new home.  And then starting a new semester at school.  And soon I realized that I was writing every day, always with new and fascinating things to record.

In fact, my life was bursting open into all kinds of new directions, I hardly knew what was happening! Married life was so . . . eventful.  I was doing new things every day, things I had never considered trying before – like cooking, gardening, sewing, traveling.   Life just kept getting more complicated, strange, surprising, and new.  Life didn’t end for me when I got married; in many ways it had just begun.

Come back tomorrow for part two of “Why I started Project M”: It deals with my realization that I didn’t know anything about anything — except one thing.

Image courtesy of Signora Oriente.

Tagged as: life after marriage, marriage and journaling