I’ve written in a journal for years, not daily, but often. During the years I’ve worked as a remote area nurse I’ve jotted down thoughts, events, names and places. It helped with all the changes that were happening, to feel real and solid, the events able to be processed and not to disappear into nothingness.

Writer, Joan Didion, stated that notebook-keepers “are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

I wrote because I didn’t want to ever lose the experiences, because I never wanted to forget the names, because one day I knew I would want to read my own stories.