Mar
5
Journals, a History
Filed Under Organization
Some habits are hard to break. Especially for people with addictive personalities and proclivities toward organizational paranoia. People like myself.
For me, keeping a journal has been tough to get over. Sure, some of my friends scoff at journal keeping as a ridiculous pursuit. But, until recently, I’d been doing it for some time. It was part of me. When I started writing on this site a few months ago, I noted how I had stopped with the journal business. An activity that started out to help me grow had started to hinder me. So I quit. I was quite content with the decision at the time, but now it’s starting to nag at me, creeping in around the edges of my brain like the third day of nicotine withdrawal.
Sometimes I write to figure things out. This is one of those times.
I first started keeping a journal in fifth grade. This was an assignment from my English teacher, Mrs. Clark. At the beginning of class each day, we had to sit in the little nook of books and write for ten or fifteen minutes. Five lines were required. I believe she read these. I think I remember notes from her about what we wrote. I can’t even remember what I wrote and would give a large sum of money to find one of these spiral bound notebooks today.
It was a good idea. A new approach to get kids to write a bit more, think a bit more. The flaw was in her reading. Sure, a teacher couldn’t really judge an assigned task without checking up, but the whole idea of a journal is something private. For such a diary to be up for judgement really kills the whole idea. You can’t let your mind go when you know Mrs. Clark will be reading it over her lunch break.
Still, the idea stuck and a habit was born. Throughout the rest of school, I kept a personal journal. I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t write regularly or about anything important. Mostly rants about girls or parents, as I recall. Looking back, I regret I wasn’t more intense in my examination of life. But hey, who is at fourteen? Complaining about homework is really all the stress a kid needs. My journals at the time would be a testament to a fortunate childhood.
In college, I got a little more serious. Everyone thinks they got a little more serious in college, right? The girls were older now and no parents were around. Things were bound to get serious. But I wasn’t any more dedicated to a daily ritual like record keeping.
Around twenty-three, I got serious. I started writing every day. This was kind of a low point for me, but the journal helped. I used words to figure things out, to dream, to motivate. Oddly, my outlook seemed to improve in step with the physical quality of my journals. I started with cheap spiral bound notebooks, then on to composition books, then to leather books, and finally to hipster Moleskines. I filled eight volumes in nine years. Then I quit.
As I said before, the journal keeping had become something of a drag. It was a chore. The book was only serving to hold me back. The journal had become a surrogate for actual writing. So I quit, challenging myself to write other things, in other ways. And this has worked.
But.
I still carry a little notebook around with me. I have a lot of nutty ideas I want to capture throughout the day. I found myself writing little notes about what was going on in life. We’ve got a little boy who does something different and amazing almost every day. He clapped his hands for the first time and I thought, I should really write this down.
And this moment really captured the root of why I am compelled to keep a journal. This journal keeping is in lock step with my organizational preoccupations, working to prepare me for the day when I wake up and cannot remember anything. The mind is weak. Even if I can avoid spontaneous and inexplicable amnesia, moments of time will slowly leach away in the catacombs of my brain. Today, I just forgot two more people from my high school class. Gone forever. And I don’t even know who they were.
So all this work is really an effort to avoid my mortality.
Another thought behind these journals is the idea that someone in the future will pick them up. Maybe my son. Maybe Mrs. Clark’s great-granddaughter. But this goes back to the problem of having an audience. When you write in a journal as if you have an audience, then you leave out all the interesting bits that people wold want to read anyway, so no one wins.
Someday my present self, past self, and future self are going to meet behind the woodshed and have it out once and for all.
I see I’m at the bottom of this page and haven’t figured anything out, yet again. It seems important that I capture the important points of life somehow. It also seems important I have some place to let my mind doodle around. Maybe that place is a journal again. But maybe that’s just what an addiction feels like.
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