My journaling history

[chanaleh]

(One in an occasional series of ruminative essays on personal topics.)

At Arisia, one of the topics covered at gnomi's LJ panel was the interrelation between online journaling and paper journaling. How many of us keep regular paper journals in addition to LJ, and if we do both, how do we use them differently?

A whole lot of people said they also keep paper journals. I said that I don't. But this reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten about my earlier journaling practices.

The first time I kept a regular journal was in seventh grade (1983-84), in my Humanities class; this was basically a supplemental gifted-and-talented class, primarily literature-focused, though we also did other cool stuff that was more hands-on. My teacher was this amazing, wonderful, warm woman named Cheryn Maesch, and one of the ongoing elements of the class was journal-keeping; we'd spend a few minutes every day with our spiral notebooks, take them home if we wanted I think, hand them in at the end of each week or two, and she'd look over them -- and make little comments in the margins. Shades of LJ, anyone?

This created enough of a bond for me that somehow, when the year was over, I kept writing in the journal and bringing it back to Mrs. Maesch, long after I no longer had her for class (though lucky for me she moved up to the high school not long after I did, and I think I eventually got to take at least one other class from her). And she, bless her heart, never batted an eye, never suggested it might be time to phase out "le journal" -- but kept taking those ratty notebooks from me and reading them and giving me her comments and taking it seriously and, above all, listening. Which kindness I did not fully appreciate at the time, but in retrospect I am now profoundly grateful.

What did I talk about? Hell if I know. Or rather, I mostly do know and I'm rather appalled: my love life, both existent and nonexistent. My whole life (literally starting from age seven) I had one crush after another, mostly unrequited, so I spent a whole lot of energy and ink grappling with my feelings about this boy or that boy. The one comment that sticks in my mind was the time she wrote, "It seems this is turning into a 'love-journal'!" And though I knew it was true, it basically never occurred to me that perhaps there were other meaningful issues I could contemplate and address. I had thoughts and ideas, but it didn't strike me that I should use that space for them... or perhaps that they were worth elaborating on. (I was mostly a writer of poetry and some fiction at that point, and certainly a voracious reader, but almost exclusively of fiction; it didn't come to me until considerably later that "nonfiction" could include not only the dreaded "expository writing," but also personal reflection and insight on all kinds of truly meaningful, interesting things, and that it was a way of seeking as well as speaking truth. But I digress.)

Anyway -- Cheryn, I just wish you could have known how prophetic that assessment was. My preoccupation with my own romantic angst was a theme that would come up again and again later: when I saw my first therapist (starting the summer after I graduated college and continuing for just over 5 years), he used to say to me regularly, "You're 23 years old. Quit worrying so much about who you {are, aren't, should be} having sex with, and WRITE SOMETHING!" He had me pegged as a frustrated writer busily sublimating my real goals in my sexuality (not to mention my chosen career, manipulating other people's writing). There was undoubtedly some truth in this, as to this day I'm still running from much of the writing that I say I want to do. But at least I've matured into a more well-rounded person, and started investing my energy in at least a few other meaningful questions. And at least I'm taking some steps toward incorporating more writing into my life... starting right here.

I did keep a paper journal in college, but gradually less and less, until I was only really using it when I had a crisis (usually, I admit, of the romantic kind -- see notes above) and needed to sort things out in it. I still have the last notebook I was using, but I haven't written in it in years.

But now there's LJ. In which I suddenly take up the mission of writing things that I actually think about, in addition to the assorted tsuris of my personal life. Maybe it's that I need to feel I have an audience, that someone is actually listening, in order to bother putting my thoughts out.

Comments

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I had a very similar journaling trajectory. I started my paper journal in 11th grade, after flw started keeping one. It was funny and clever and insightful and so I decided to try to do the same. We had a bit of the audience thing going, because I discovered that if I walked around with the journal my friends would pick it up and read it.

In college it became more ruminative and focused on my romantic life. You may not feel like you wrote enough about big issues in your paper journal, but I did in mine, and I'll tell you, they are unbearable to read now. Sophomoric philosophy mixed with music lyrics from pompous 1970s bands. I find it worthwhile sometimes to reread it just to remind myself of the details of a particular event that I've mostly forgotten, but otherwise it's pretty awful.

At some point I realized that I was writing in my journal very sporadically, usually to complain about things. Since my life has mostly improved in the last 10 years, this began to look pretty unbalanced, so I stopped about five years ago. Things came full circle when Frank again started one of these LJs and got me and a couple of our other friends to also do them, as a means of keeping in touch with one another. I think this is a better outlet for journaling overall, in part because it does include an audience, and in part because it takes less effort to make the journal reflect what I'm actually thinking about in a given day. It makes me consider what I mean to say more carefully.

On the other hand, the paper journal never ate my writing, like LJ just did to my first draft of this post!

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This is a thought-provoking and interesting question.

When I was 8 I was given a diary, or bought it. It was the "Ramona Quimby" diary (anyone remember her?) and I wrote about my life in it. (At one point my parents read part of it over my shoulder and beat me quite thoroughly for what I'd written about them.) I kept keeping diaries in notebooks, writing about my life, my fantasies, short stories, and far too many stupid boys, until I was 17, and in my first (and abusive) relationship. I wrote in my diary, not what went on, but what I wanted to be living, and after that relationship I was so disgusted with myself for swimming the deep waters of Denial that I stopped journalling. I always kept a folder in my email archives labelled 'diary' for personal chronicles.

Then I found LJ, which lets me have a diary where I can get friends to read and comment (but only selected pages!), and the rest is history, of a sort. :)

[zenala.livejournal.com]

I think I had a Ramona Quimby diary when I was 9 or 10 years old, though I don't think I actually wrote in it. I did have a little diary with a silly lock on it that I got for my 9th birthday which I wrote in a few times over the years. I actually filled up one journal in 10th grade when (surprise!) I had a major crush on this one guy from camp the summer before. I had another journal after that in 11th grade, which I sort of forgot about the next summer after I started going with my first boyfriend, and never really kept one again till after I graduated from MIT, though I've filled up 2 books since then. I can definitely relate to the denial thing... (and then there's angst)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I think it's hilarious that three different women so far report having had a Ramona Quimby diary! (I always identified more with Beezus, I guess. I was just thinking about the old Beverly Cleary books recently.)

My mom bought me a Judy Blume diary when I was in, oh, fifth or sixth grade (when she also bought me about a dozen of her books, which I did like). I made a few sporadic efforts at writing in it, but nothing really took hold. Until later, in high school, when I started using it to record my more graphic sexual feelings (and occasionally experiences) -- something that really *needed* to be private. And those entries were still sporadic, but they served a different and important function.

I stored that diary between the mattress and box spring of my bed, for years. I think I abandoned it in my parents' house altogether, and eventually got it back in one of the boxes of my things they eventually sent me. Which gives me the sinking feeling that my mom must then have looked through it (who could possibly resist that temptation?), and probably been sorry :-} But, thank God, at least I never heard anything about it from her.

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

I agree with sanpaku. I also think LJ is a better journal than a paper journal.

I guess because I was an only child and a girl, everyone encouraged me to have a journal/diary even when very young. My very first journal I can remember was a Ramona Quimby journal which my parents gave me when I was eight. I kept it up on and off for about a year, and then I forgot about it. My mom re-gave it to me when I graduated from college, but I was too afraid to open it. When I moved last summer, I decided to be brave and spent an hour reading it.

It was somewhat interesting. I had written down how I felt about the Challenger explosion and my grandfather's death. The rest was just bizarre.

Such as my declaration that I wanted to have a pet unicorn and name it "Horny".

Anyway, the problem for me about keeping paper journals is that they become a sink hole of misery. I would only write in them when I was depressed, and since depression runs in my family and mine was untreated (supposedly they just made steps at finding a depression gene as reported in today's newspaper!), that would have been pretty much all the time in my childhood. I was a strange kid who was constantly terrified of falling into quicksand and the sun exploding, despite my dad's assurance that the former was non-existant in Georgia and the latter won't happen for millions of years. Even my Ramona diary is seeped in depression and despair. Like my decision to use it as a space to write a will. I was eight!!! And I wrote a will!!!

The problem with my little sink holes of misery is whenever I go back to them, I see how miserable I was when I wrote my thoughts down on paper, but I don't see the happiness parts of me which exist outside of the journal. A few years back I decided that keeping a journal on paper was too destructive. It was only chatting with myself at my worst moments. If I want to think constructively about my life, playing Tetris for hours works much better. I tossed the stack of spiral bound notebooks this past June.

Anyway, what LJ does for me that paper journals don't is it provides me with an audience. I am no longer chatting to myself. I am participating in something at least slightly constructive from a social point of view. Also, knowing others will read what I write will make me think more clearly about what I'm trying to communicate.

[tcb.livejournal.com]

I had tried over the years to keep a written journal, and failed. LJ has been the first medium that seems to have taken hold.

I think for me, it's the ease of submission; there are multiple clients for all of the different platforms I use, as well as the natural ability of the web for providing formatting options (mainly bold and italics, although I had the opportunity to use superscript the other day).

but the audience aspect is an interesting one. maybe there is something to knowing that you are putting yourself out there, and that having other people read what you write gives some more weight to the thoughts, and solidifies them more.

[navrins]

I've never kept a journal. Never felt the need. I know what I'm thinking, mostly, and don't feel the need to preserve for posterity. (And have had very few crushes worth writing about, even by the standards one has at the time.) Working out issues I can do talking to myself without the dubious assistance of pencil or keyboard.

But I do often want to write Statements, Observations, Arguments, Reactions, and such, and to write them someplace where those interested will see them. Hence my essays web page, and now this.

[cos]

When I was in high school, I used to keep a "journal" of sorts, but it wasn't about writing down thoughts, it was about remembering. I wanted to preserve my memory of what those times were like, by writing brief notes in a calendar at the end of each day, most of them just a word or two, that I hoped would trigger my memory later.

Then I got to college and started using email, and lost all motivation to write anything on paper. If I use email to manage my life and to socialize, I can go back to my email to remember when I want to remember. Email has been my journal ever since. (I save it all)

what LJ is entirely unlike

[roozle.livejournal.com]

I kept a paper journal in high school and college; there's a stack of spiral-bound notebooks that I really oughta get rid of. And since then, at various points and usually briefly, I have adopted various free-writing practices. What you can do on paper, when noone is listening, that you can't do on LJ as well is just start writing and keep writing until -- through the writing -- you discover what you think.

I'd never put the randomness, the back-and-forth with myself, the thoughts that start and trail off or just don't make sense, the working through the reasoning, in LiveJournal. Too much of an audience.

I don't keep a regular paper journal these days, but when I want to find out what I think on a troubling topic, I turn to a spiral-bound notebook and a good pen.

[avram]

When I was in, um, I think it was sixth grade, one of my teachers had us keep daily journals. I hated it, couldn't think of anything to write. In fact, I generally hated writing till I discovered computers.

I've tried to keep paper journals a few times in my life, never succeeding at keeping regular entires for more than a few weeks. Though a few months ago I was looking through one of those aborted journals and found something I had totally forgotten about that I was glad to find, and that's gotten me into the habit of occasionally writing stuff down in my latest paper journal that I don't feel like making public. (Which reminds me -- I should make another entry about, well, some recent stuff.)

And my LJ has helped me notice things about patterns in my emotional state that have turned out useful.

[zenala.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm glad I'm not the only one who hated the assigned journals. Maybe it's just my stubbornness--my mom said I could be pigheaded as a child. When I moved to Ohio, the schools tried to emphasize writing a lot, and sharing with the class, which at first I was really excited about, because before I'd been writing a lot of stories on my own and sharing them. But a lot of the teachers weren't very careful about controlling student comments, so if someone didn't like you they could just say something about your story, "constructive" was not necessary feature of the criticism. Luckily people were a little nicer in high school, when we wrote more personal stuff, but I found it very difficult to write about anything I really cared about if the whole class was going to hear. Granted, I was very private even when I was little, but being told my inner-most personal thoughts weren't good enough inner-most personal thoughts didn't help in sharing...

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I used to occasionally write really bad journal entries--usually with an audience in mind, usually just after I'd read a book in which someone kept a journal. Someone gave me a Lord of the Rings diary in high school, with really gorgeous artwork (probably still in print, actually) and I half-filled it with entries which made me so angry to read, two years later, that I threw it out.

Other than that, I kept mostly journals full of lists (a habit which continues to worry my mom). Lists of stuff I wanted to do when I grew up, favorite songs on the radio (in case I could ever actually get through on the request hotline), wish lists for birthdays/Hanukkah, characterizations for the stories I was writing, etc. Also I copied down poems I really liked, so I'd have them all in one place. I loved the pretty blank books that people kept giving me, and wanted to make good use of them. I've mostly outgrown this habit, except that if I'm reading a fantasy novel set in an insanely complicated universe I usually take notes to make the universe easier to keep track of--and I use ordinary spiral-bound books for that. I do have a Chronicles of Narnia journal, in which I try to write down really important things that happen. (This idea is also taken from a book, in this case a young adult novel by Norma Johnston called 'The Keeping Days'. Keeping Days are days you want to hold onto, or days that are going to hold onto you.)

Online journalling is different. I did have to do those journals in grade school, that the teacher would read, where I quickly learned to not to write anything negative about my classmates because the teacher would write back to me about having an attitude problem. Other than that, I've never let anyone read any of my journals. Or anything else I write. (Except for endless, copious letters & e-mails. Dr.Matt has been putting up with my correspondence since about 1994.)

I tend not to have time to sit down and keep a journal. I don't really know why LiveJournal has been so much easier to stick with, except that I spend some 8 hours every weekday at a computer, so that it's just a few keystrokes away. Works for me.

[goljerp]

Interesting...

I was encouraged to start a "trip diary" by my parents when we went to California when I was... um... young. Under 10. I'm not sure how old I was, actually. 7? 6?

Anyhow, after I got back, I kept a diary of sorts in small notebooks for a while, but mostly it consisted of "sorry I haven't written in so long...". I kept up the idea of "trip diaries", however, on and off for a while. At other times, I've supplemented these with other means -- at one point in high school I wrote a basic program where I could write entries, which could then be saved to a 5 1/4-inch floppy. I think I used it a couple of times that I was home on break. I also saved E-mails that I wrote to friends, much as Cos does.

The first time I went to Europe, I don't think I wrote in a journal (or if I did, I'm not sure what happened to it); the second time I went (before my year in Israel), I did. I continued writing in the journal in Israel, although I didn't use it as a tool to deal with the impending breakup of my marriage. After I returned to the states, I started a new journal, which I mainly write in while travelling (nothing like train rides for soul searching), but with an emphasis on emotional stuff. And, of course, descriptions of the trips. LJ has tended to supplement the other forms of writing I do - I've continued to write E-mail and in the paper journal, although I suppose LJ has stifled (to a certain extent) my tendencies to write mass mailings to my friends. I still do, but not as often.