Journaling

As if keeping a blog where I talk exclusively about my own thoughts, feelings, and experiences wasn’t enough of a tip-off that I’m way too concerned with myself, I’ve also been keeping a journal since August 11, 2013. I’ve updated it every single day in the six years since, covering my entire high school experience and three quarters of college. That’s a little over two thousand entries, spanning a collection of six full tattered spiral-bound and composition, with a seventh in progress. And I doubt anyone will ever read it, not even me.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe after I die some family members might page through it, or some historian might use it as a footnote in some argument about politics that haven’t happened yet (though I doubt it; historians of the future won’t exactly be hard-pressed for personal information about out generation). And I’ve glanced over it, once in a while, though I’ve never read it through all the way and probably never will. Because doing so would mean trudging through pages of entries from uneventful chapters of my life, like Saturday, February 7, 2015: “Slept it pretty late. Saw a terrible movie. Pretty warm outside for once.” I mean, seriously, how could that be interesting to anyone at all?

So why do I do it? On August 11, 2013 I probably had grand ideas about preserving my life for posterity’s sake, but nowadays these seven notebooks are mostly one of the less harmful products of my clinical OCD. I know that I won’t sleep be able to fall asleep if I don’t write something, even if it is nothing more than the thirteen useless words from February 7, 2015. If there is a deeper reason that’s been driving me, it’s probably a fear that the days of my life will all blend together into one mass of memory, and that I’ll eventually forget everything that mattered to me. But, if that’s the problem, then three not-quite sentences the state of sleep, weather, and cinema on February 7, 2015 don’t really do much to preserve the importance of my life. If anything, they raise questions of whether I’m doing anything worth remembering. 

But, of course, the entries aren’t always like that. Some are truly bizarre, made even stranger by the lack of context supporting them, like September 11, 2013: “Guy from the Thespian Club running around acting weird and slapping people. He came after me, so I ran and hid in the Euro room.” Was the Thespian Club doing some experimental recruitment strategy at the activities fair, or was it a rouge member unleashing thespianism upon Edina High School? Did he actually pose a credible threat to me, or was I just a weak-willed sophomore who saw danger everywhere? (I can actually guess the answer to that one, but I’d rather not dwell on it.) No matter what, the more interesting sections of my journals are disturbing in their own right. Clearly I imagined that the Thespian Club incident was important enough to get a reserved spot in my mind for all time, and all I’d need was a couple lines to retrieve the anecdote from memory storeage. But it didn’t work; it’s all gone, and the only hint that any of it ever happened are two sentences that might’ve been hyperbole, or straight-up lies. (Maybe it’s a bad sign that I don’t even trust my past self to tell me the truth.)

And then, of course, there’s the problem of what my journals don’t capture. The entries are never exhaustive or emotional (with a couple comically melodramatic exceptions where I lapse into purple prose and end sentences with multiple exclamation points). As my dad often notes in his sermons, life isn’t like the end of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, where everyone immediately recognizes the important things you’ve done, throws a parade in your honor, and gives you a giant glowing orb for your troubles. The small moments: the thoughts that occur to you on walks between classes and seem incidental at the time, only to grow, or the friendships that start with a passing comment, none of that makes it onto the page. Keeping a journal really wrecks the realism of any epistolary story because, read as a narrative, my journal is absolutely terrible: names appear with no introduction and the main character makes random (and often really, really bad) choices for no apparent reason. 

So yeah, don’t expect a lot from journaling, especially if you aren’t about to invest a whole lot of time into it. Half of it is boring, half of it is completely indecipherable, and most of the real story is missing. But at most it’s only three minutes a night. It’s a light investment, and I think it’s worth it for a fast and loose, incomplete and incoherent account of my life.