Some notes from my journal
And the first fiction I’ve written in a decade.
This week, paid versions of Moxie will be sent today and on Thursday. A free essay will be sent on Wednesday and Friday. I had a few personal issues last week and so that means double content this week.
xx
Hannah
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For a personal project, I have been looking through a lot of my old journal entries. Below is an excerpt from something I wrote about 12 weeks ago, edited for clarity and with minor changes to make it (ideally) more engaging to a reader, rather than existing only as notes for myself.
It’s a short excerpt, a bit of self-examination.
I’ve also included a very short vignette- I haven’t written much fiction in the last ten years and while I’ve been working on outlining novels, I haven’t written any fiction from a first person perspective in a very long time. That is, until yesterday, when I wrote this in 25 minutes as a writing exercise. (That is to say, it’s rough but I forgot how much fun it is to write fiction and I will do a lot more of that from now on.)
I hope you enjoy both!
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From my journal:
As a child I needed- as a survival tactic- to anticipate and understand my mother’s perspective and emotions, even when I was experiencing; learning about, my own. She was- likely is- erratic and unpredictable, hard to soothe. Of course it should not be a child’s job to soothe their parent, but it was my job and my brother’s job and each of my sisters’ job. And so we all have developed an ability to quickly, even in intense moments, understand other people’s emotions and feelings, we’ve learned to read people quickly.
When I was a child, I was not allowed to cry or be angry or show much emotion at all, other that a detached happiness. “Who do you think you are?” “Get that smirk off your face.” “Don’t cry.” The chorus of my youth. And as an adult I have incredible emotional control. I am very even tempered, very calm. I rarely snap and when I do, it’s momentary and I recover quickly. When I meet people in person, they often remark on how calm I am. I think that, because it is in contrast with some other aspects of my personality, the calmness is unexpected, perhaps even unsettling.