My journals are stereotypically ripped and torn, bursting at the seams and held closed only by sheer willpower and a fraying elastic. The black leather covers are blanketed in stickers collected from various time periods of my life: a Record Archive banner from high school, a fluffy white-dog with black glasses from my Tumblr days, a turquoise logo from a clothing store I frequented in college.
Now, they sit on a shelf in my bookcase. All of them lined up like my own secret library. I love the sense of accomplishment that comes with their finality. My rigid soldiers of big emotions that couldn’t fit inside my head.
I used to journal constantly. Not that I was any good at a consistent practice—I remember doing an “experiment” in high school as an article for our newspaper where I taxed myself with writing in a journal every night for a week (and I still couldn’t do it)—but I was depressed and anxious and romanticized the beauty of an emotionally torn girl noodling away in her journal. I wrote disastrously bad poetry, tapped photos and trinkets and sticky-notes inside the pages. They were relics of my age, of my personhood, of my feelings.
And when I started writing the memoir, I was able to return to them for those very reasons. I cracked open the peeling spine, said a silent prayer for the embarrassment that was sure to come, and read. Like they were my own novels that I penned because, in essence, they were. Suddenly, I had this archive. A primary source, as my high school English teacher would have called it. Detailed descriptions of near daily recollections, angers, frustrations, events. As someone who often worries about not having enough stories to write about, it was a treasure-trove. And it allowed me to pinpoint my exact location, haircut, outfit, and time of certain moments I was already bringing into the story.
But I haven’t journaled for myself in a long time. Probably since before I graduated college in 2020. It wasn’t really until I had a conversation with an acquaintance from that time, that the idea of ever returning to this form of writing came to mind. We were talking about my decision to step back from the memoir for the month of December (and, as I’m writing this, looks like might be January as well). Her response, though, was she could never fathom taking a break from writing. “It’s how I make sense of the world,” she said.
Of course, I wasn’t going to stop writing entirely. There was all the columns, the freelance articles, the just conceived pieces that were barely walking. Even still her comment struck me, because it hadn’t seemed like I used writing to comprehend the world in a while.
When I start writing an essay, it’s typically when a moment or event already stands out to me as being creatively rich. Maybe I know what it’s about already. Or, I at least have an idea. I choose to write about it because there’s a part of me that’s already decided it’s worthy of that attention. And typically, it’s less for a “me,” and more for an “us.” How we can make sense of this thing together, or how my experience might lend itself to the reader’s as well. I don’t know if writing has felt like something just for me since grad school.
So, I opened a blank page.
It was weird.
Despite being a creative nonfiction writer, someone who — at its most basic level—writes about myself all the time, this felt…different. In fact, and not to cannibalize writing I’d done with the purpose of not sharing it, I wrote, “Writing is always a conversation, but journaling really is just between me and me. Writing an essay, for better or worse, feels like writing to an audience.”
When I described this feeling to my therapist, I had to use hand-motions, mime a sort of graphic of what journaling felt like in comparison to my nonfiction work. (In my head, the diagrams feel oddly similar to the language used in Arrival, but maybe I’ve read “The Story of Your Life” one too many times with my students.)
Journal writing, to me, is a sort of loop. Where I’m both writer and receiver all at once. So, perhaps not even a true circle but a sort of dot. It is all compounding in and out of me at once. With essay writing, it’s more the path of a skipping stone. I throw it into the water, but where it goes next is sort of up to the speed at which I throw it, the angle, and the depth of the water. But I do know, no matter what, that it never truly comes back to me.
Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” tasks writers with journaling three pages every morning for eight weeks, without looking back to read them. There’s been numerous creatives in my life who have lauded this exercise, who are dedicated to the maintenance and upkeep of their journals, their journaling practice.
In fact, many of the folks who come to my writing hour would consider themselves to be “journal-ers” or diary keepers, before they ever claimed to be writers. (We are working on this—let it be known that I think any form of writing, “high brow” or not, makes you a writer.) One of the women who is probably in her mid to late 50s now, has the first journal she ever kept as an eight year old. “I have an entire closest filled with them,” she said. “I can’t imagine getting rid of any.”
She’s the one who shared a William Faulkner quote with us, on the day I brought in journaling as a topic of discussion. It was the one about how he didn’t know what he thought until he could see what he wrote. And the thing is, that’s how I used to be. Until writing became more about the craft, the work, the pressure to perform and perfect and publish. In which my passion became more of my job, still enriched with the inner creative life that writing demands, but no longer, I don’t know, so pure.
I’d like to get back to that. Even if not every single day—because, again, I’ve never once claimed to be good at that—I’d like to burrow into the practice more. If only to build the archive. To cover them with stickers collected from a certain year, to memorialize life in a way that’s tangible, that I can return to. So often, when people ask me why I started writing, I tell them it was to work through big feelings and questions and, really, on impulse. But I think this whole time, it’s actually been about remembering.