Visual journaling

I follow Robin Atkins's blog Beadlust, and enjoy sharing her ideas and thoughts about life and ART. Yesterday she had a blog entry about Visual Journaling. She shared some blogs of people that I like to follow also. She wanted to know about her readers ideas on sharing their journal online. Boy, this was a tough one for me to think about. This is what I wrote in response to Robin's question.

"Interesting thoughts & ideas, Robin. I thought all day about how I would answer a question about visual journaling. I don't really do this, and I had to figure out why I don't. I use to keep a diary when I was a little girl writing secrets and dreams until the day my Mother found it and read what I had written and then punished me for the negative thoughts I had. So I kept my thoughts and ideas to myself. I can't help breaking out of that habit. Later on in college, I did a writer's journal for all the literature classes I completed. And oh yes! I did & still do write notes to myself in all my books. It is a way to make them personal to just me. I wrote about the pieces of literature I was reading and how it related to my life jotting down ideas for papers to be written or themes to explore. Later on back when the Internet was brand new & people just started to have personal web
page (I owned Scottie Obsession), I use to write stories and had a whole website devoted to the antics of a group of Scottish Terriers. It was so much fun, but then when my first Scottie, FalaPink, died, it all dried up. I had no more words. I had no more stories. I was helpless. I tried to journal, to do a diary, nothing, nothing and more nothing. I tried to paint, to sew, to quilt, to volunteer...nothing. Then I picked up a needle and beads, and all those words came through my fingers onto a piece of fabric. And you know what? All those words became tiny pixels expanding across the fabric using beads as my letters. I still don't share my emotions in my blog. It is still so hard for me to open up, because I'm still that teenager who got caught spilling out her emotions to be found and used against her. I wish I could be like so many others and explore my emotions on my blog, but I can't. My emotions instead spill out into my Art each bead or fiber at a time. My heart wants the world to be at peace, and happy so therefore all my Art is made to make a viewer smile. Smiles to me will conquer the world! So make Art with your heart, and pass on those smiles."

So this is what I feel. Strange, but I feel naughty sharing my emotions here with the world to view. My family is very Appalachian which means you keep your feelings to yourself. Can I break myself out of this tradition? Can I reach past that teenager who was punished for writing a dream that to her Mother was false? We grew up with the saying "don't air your dirty laundry". Who's to care? And who's to say my laundry is so foul? Oh well, I'm going to think more about all this and try to push through. What more can we do except break out of our self prison, and throw our faces up to the bright warming Sun and learn to smile.