Voenix Rising

I started keeping a Journal in the late 80s, shortly after I moved to San Francisco. (I may have told this story before, so if it sounds familiar, forgive me.) I did this shortly after seeing Prick Up Your Ears, where the protagonist journaled incessantly. It inspired me to document my adventures in The City—both lascivious and otherwise—because I knew at some point memories were going to fade and what better way of pinpointing when events occurred than to have them recorded in real time?

(There are also diskettes hidden away in a wall of one of the apartments I lived in that contain the first few years of that Journal, although I’m sure they’ll be unreadable if and when anyone discovers them in the future.)

I kept the Journals up for over twenty years. At one point I had most of them printed out and bound, but I eventually shredded them, keeping only the electronic copies. Little did I realize at the time that the electronic copies would become increasingly difficult to access as file formats evolved. (WordPerfect, anyone?)

I’ve spent a lot of free time converting these file formats into the 21st Century, although I’m sure at some point they will become as difficult to access as the originals were—a fact I just realized while writing this.

Two things stand out while I’ve been doing the conversions. The first was how—for lack of a better word—lost I was before my cancer diagnosis forced a much overdue examination of my life. I spent a great deal of time “looking for love in all the wrong places,” and while the adventures were certainly fun, they were ultimately unable to fill the need that was driving me into these situations in the first place.

The second thing that stands out is how, despite recording the names and the details of my interactions with the men I dated, there are many—way too many, truth be told—names for whom I cannot conjure a face. Digital photography wasn’t a thing like it is today, so even though I was a rather prolific photographer, I often never got photos of the men I was dating.

I bitched about work a lot, although looking back on it now I didn’t realize how good I had it at the time. When you work at a small architectural firm with the same four people for nearly a decade, you become like a family—with all the positives and negatives that relationship confers.

My weight was another thing I obsessed over in my writings; something that didn’t really disappear from my life until after the cancer diagnosis and I came to simply embrace—and love—my body for what it was.

I stopped Journaling when I got the cancer diagnosis. I didn’t want my writing to turn into a pity-party as I was going through treatment (which it easily could have), and frankly, I was getting bored with it. I discovered blogging a couple years later and while it’s not quite the same thing as Journaling (especially of late), it’s fulfilled that need to express myself—even if it’s not as easy to look up when stuff happened since I don’t share everything.