Before there was What’s Up with Wendi, there were these.

Journals. Lots of them.

Different sizes, different covers, different chapters of my life. Some held quotes or poems I found and wanted to remember. Some held poems I wrote myself. Some held comic strips that made me laugh. And some held the thoughts that showed up at three in the morning and couldn’t wait til daylight.

Happy thoughts. Sad thoughts. Angry thoughts. Confused thoughts. Experiences I wanted to remember and feelings I was trying to understand.

And here’s the thing:

I never expected anyone to read them.

Those pages were mine.

Writing was an outlet. Writing was my outlet.

Words may be my love language

Like a lot of girls, I started with diaries.

Friends. Boys. School. Probably some incredibly important drama that would make me laugh today.

By college, though, the writing had changed.

I was learning about myself. Who was I? Who did I want to be? What did I believe?

And apparently, words have always been my love language.

I collected them before I ever thought about sharing my own: quotes, poems, passages, song lyrics, even comic strips that said something I wanted to remember. I’d cut things out, tape them onto pages and surround them with my own thoughts.

Even my handwriting tells a little bit of the story. Different pens. Different pages. Different versions of me. But the same need to put the words somewhere.

After college, I traveled to Israel with a journal a friend had given me. I filled it with thoughts and experiences from that trip.

In one entry from December 1997, I was walking along the beach in Tel Aviv thinking about life, relationships, connection and whether any of us really goes through life alone.

20-something Wendi didn’t do light vacation journaling.

Some things haven’t changed.

Somewhere around then, journaling became more than keeping track of what happened.

It became a place to put what was happening inside me.

Before I found my voice

Looking through these journals again, I realized something.

For a lot of my life, my strongest voice may have existed on those pages.

I grew up in the early ’80s hearing many version of girls should be seen and not heard.

Be nice. Don’t make waves. Don’t disappoint people. Don’t be too much.

I’m not about to get all I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar here. Although if you’ve read my music post, you know there is a song for this.

And yes, there are song lyrics in these journals too.

Of course there are.

I do wonder how much of those messages I carried with me without realizing it.

Because I became really good at worrying about everyone else.

And, spoiler alert: I still do.

Somewhere to put it all

Life happened.

There was love and loss. Motherhood and grief. Career and family. Happiness and heartbreak. Plenty of things I understood and plenty I didn’t.

There were times when I felt very alone with my thoughts.

That’s where writing came in.

The page didn’t need an explanation. It didn’t tell me how I was supposed to feel. It didn’t need me to make anyone else feel better.

It just gave me somewhere to put it.

Sometimes there are things we can’t say out loud.

Sometimes we don’t even know how to say them yet.

So I wrote.

Different versions of me

Of course, bringing out the journals meant opening them.

I started reading.

And there they were, different versions of me.

Some pages made me smile. Some brought back memories I hadn’t thought about in years. Others came from bigger transition points in my life.

One page from September 2020 begins simply:

“Lost in my deepest thoughts…”

Underneath is a list.

My mom. Jordyn. Jewish holidays. Marriage. Motherhood. Professional career. Passions. Finding myself. Home. Memories. Friendships.

Some were really dark, so I kept pushing those farther down the list. Some made me smile, so I let those rise to the top.

I don’t need to share everything I wrote during those years.

Some pages are still mine.

Some stories will stay mine too.

But reading them now is a little like reading a story when I already know the ending.

I have compassion for the woman on these pages.

Sometimes I want to shake her.

Sometimes I want to tell her it’s going to be okay.

And sometimes I just want to keep reading to see if she gets her happy ending.

Even when it’s my own life, I still want a great ending to a good romantic comedy.

When I Started Listening to Me

Something changed around 45.

Or maybe it had been changing for years and I finally noticed.

Enough life had happened that I started asking myself a question I hadn’t always been very good at asking:

What do I want?

For a lifelong people pleaser, that’s a surprisingly complicated question.

I started trusting myself a little more. Caring a little less about what others thought and whether everyone approved.

Not zero, mind you.

Let’s not get crazy.

I still worry about disappointing people. I still overthink. I still occasionally take responsibility for feelings that are not mine to manage.

But little by little, I found my voice.

And once I started finding it, it showed up everywhere; in my relationships, in the choices I made for myself and in my career.

I became more willing to say what I thought. More willing to ask for what I needed. More willing to trust myself.

That doesn’t mean I stopped questioning myself.

Please.

Have we met?

It just means the questions stopped automatically winning.

Still Figuring It Out

I’m still a work in progress.

I still overthink. I still cry. I still worry about disappointing people. And there are still things I find easier to write than say out loud.

But I’m also more confident in my voice now.

At home. At work. In my relationships.

And apparently, on the internet.

Which brings me back to What’s Up with Wendi.

When I started this little corner of the internet, I thought I was simply starting to write again.

Italy gave me my first story. Then came music. LEGO. Life. Random thoughts. Food. Memories. Things that make me laugh and things that make me cry.

But maybe this isn’t all that different from those journals.

I still collect words.

I still wake up at two or three in the morning with thoughts that need somewhere to go.

There are still things I can write that are harder to say out loud.

And if nobody reads What’s Up with Wendi, I would still write.

Because I still need the outlet.

The difference is, now I hit Publish

For years, the things I wrote were just for me.

Now I’m opening the door a little.

Not all the way.

But every once in a while, I decide to let someone into my world and my thoughts.

And yes, sometimes there’s a moment after hitting Publish when I think:

Oh shit. I just told everybody that.

But mostly?

It feels freeing.

Because I know what it’s like to have thoughts and feelings you don’t quite know what to do with. I know what it’s like to feel alone with them.

And maybe someone reads one of these stories and recognizes a little piece of themselves.

Maybe they laugh.

Maybe they cry.

Maybe they think, Oh. Me too.

And maybe, for just a moment, they feel a little less alone.

If What’s Up with Wendi becomes something bigger someday, great.

But if it doesn’t?

I’ll still write.

There will still be words I want to save. Ridiculous things I want to remember. Experiences I want to capture. Feelings I need somewhere to put.

And undoubtedly, more 2 a.m. thoughts.

Writing has always given me somewhere to put the things I couldn’t say out loud.

Maybe it still does.

I thought I had started writing again.

Maybe what I really did was finally decide my voice was worth hearing. ❤️