On Keeping a Notebook*
I saw that Julien had two notebooks behind him at the coffee bar, so naturally I asked what he was up to. “One’s a journal in the traditional sense, that I’m halfway done with and have had for a number of years. The other one is for everything else, and I go through one in a year.” We talked about what made a journal or diary “traditional,” and the chore aspect of recording down what you’ve done in a day to look back on. It reminded me of my favorite essay by Joan Didion*.
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic.
“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it?”
To Julien’s point:
“At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions what I have tried dutifully to record a day’s event, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.”
“How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.”
Whenever I go home and look in my childhood closet, I see a big brown box decorated with my mother’s handwriting: Lily’s Journals. She has kept every journal I started since I was little. Travel journals I kept for one vacation only, composition notebooks where I kept stories and doodles in elementary school. I keep my most prized journals with me in my own apartment—these are the Moleskines from age sixteen onwards. They tell my story through adolescence, which isn’t for anyone but myself.
“We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption…we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”
The number of stickers on each cover decreases as the length of each entry increases—an inverse relationship. I watch myself start with pencil only (the OCD days of not wanting spelling errors) and end up consistently using a cheap ballpoint pen. I used to paste memorabilia within the pages in real time, but slowly transitioned to keeping them in the back pocket. I come across the journal that abruptly stops halfway through during age 21, a time where I lost all creative motivation in my life and was nearing the end of a stifling relationship. I see the entries I obviously wrote after drinking, entries I carefully crafted at a coffee shop on a Saturday morning, entries suffering the side effects of a particularly bumpy airplane ride.
These days, there’s no method to my writing madness. Why did I write it down? Because preservation of the self is my necessity. You process, and you accept, and you learn when you face what you write. I believe the most impactful skill a young person can have is self-awareness—maybe even the point of self-criticism, in an attempt to understand one’s thinking and actions. Why not explore these in the comfort of a non-public space, where only you can judge?
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not…We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”