On my fourteenth birthday, my sister Bridget gave me my first journal. It was blue with stars and moons and zodiac signs on it. In its pages I cataloged my highs and lows: boyfriends, bulimia, girlfriends, self-mutilation, school, rape; my life in general. As my mind began losing memory due to a mental illness, keeping a journal filled with the nothings and everythings of my life helped me to remember.

Two journals after my first, I was seventeen and about to commit suicide. I took my three journals and burned them before I swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. While in the psych ward, I found that I was going more crazy, not getting better. I swiped an ink pen from the nurses station and wrote my thoughts and feelings on paper towels from the bathroom. I learned that journaling, that writing it all down was a saving grace: it helped me stay alive.

After I returned home from the hospital, my mother began going through my things, reading my letters and poetry and bits of paper (journal entries?). I soon found myself keeping my journal online at LiveJournal under the user name danikus (which was deleted in late-2002). After graduating high school, I took residence in Port Huron, Michigan, and in November 2002 I created POLAR at Blurty.

POLAR became the home of everything that was happening in my life, much like the paper journals of my youth. I kept my home at Blurty because it was a small and quiet journaling community, unlike LiveJournal that seemed crowded and loud. As time went on, however, the friends I had at Blurty moved to LiveJournal, and I soon found myself alone.

In June 2008 I moved back to LiveJournal to be closer to friends and to participate in populated communities of interest, and to make my journal more interactive (i.e., YouTube movies).

POLAR is currently a PDF file safe and sound in a file in the oblivion that is the Internet. It will always be a precious collection of my life, and as I cleared out my Blurty account, a certain sadness came over me. It's not just deleting a tired webpage, it's the death of my old life.

journal now located at:
too sick to pray