The serial diarist
It is done. Roughly nine months after I started, I just now finished re-reading all of my personal diaries, spanning across 22 years, 87 books and 15,508 pages, predominantly handwritten. Over the course of more than two decades, I went through all of high school and uni, several relationships and questionable encounters, worked more than twelve different jobs and, amongst other random events, built a tiny house, appeared on stage with Renée Fleming, published two novels, won a YouTube talent award and traveled all the way to Hawaii to meet up with strangers to celebrate ten years of LOST. I also had an organ removed, went through two rounds of therapy, abandoned my Master’s in philosophy, got in a car crash and had a divorce.
Even before I started to be consistent with journaling (pretty much over night in late 2003), I kept small diaries during vacations as a child. Writing had always been my way of processing things as well as my artistic outlet. There are countless little stories, poems, illustrated ‘books’ (already printed-on paper I stapled together to mimic the look) from that time before I later switched to novel writing.
Because I started so early, there is no way I can imagine my life without the written documentation I have always had. Early on I began to make digital copies of my diaries in case something happened to them, and in those folders I would also collect all photographs, personal e-mails and other documents, tagged by content and sorted by date and time. This collection currently holds about 24,000 files. In short, I have a full archive about my life. I can search for people by their name and the visual differences of the individual books always helped me remember what year something happened.
My obsession with documentation, which later morphed into videography and ultimately into my YouTube career, has had a profound impact on my life. My perception of the past, as I’ve often found, is different to that of many other people. Everything seems very synchronous to me most of the time. It feels like I can just stretch out my hand and the past is still there, along with everyone I knew then and don’t know now.
My archive has been compared to a Sherlock Holmes memory palace. Whenever people hear about my diary habits, they usually express some level of regret that they haven’t ever been able to keep up a routine. (There are also those who shrug and say, ‘I wouldn’t know what to write’ - well …) If you look at the number of smart phone pictures an average person takes, it’s clear that we are pretty keen on keeping memories (and pretty bad at executing that wish - most photos will never be looked at again). We do want to remember our lives. Or do we? Because, as it turns out, having everything that’s ever happened to you right in front of you like that has surprisingly complex effects. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s what I learnt from twenty plus years of journaling.
The narrative trap.
A routine as consistent as this one has a life of its own. Over time you develop your own language and way of storytelling in your diaries, even if it’s your life and your goal isn’t to fictionalize it. When you write it all down, thoughts, events, desires, and you don’t intend on burning the book eventually, you kind of feel that this is in fact an ongoing story. A real one, yes, but a story nonetheless, and you’re rooting for yourself, the hero. You are aware that some things you did were bad choices and didn’t serve you, so you try to reframe them in some way.
There are a thousand ways to talk about certain events in a diary - or to not talk about them. I have found that the way I choose to verbalize what was going on did also affect my actual memory of the situation later on, especially if I read the diary again later. We form narratives about our lives, whether we talk to other people or to our journals, and we like to keep things consistent. And while you might forget what you told your friend the other week and therefore have the chance to come clean, I always felt that my overall narrative in my diaries was more present in my mind and there was a certain pressure inside of me to live up to it. To the version of myself I wanted to be. The one who makes reasonable choices. The one who doesn’t end up in exploitative situations.
The desire to keep being that person has sometimes come into conflict with what actually happened, which is why, for instance, I had subconsciously left out crucial bits in one particular entry, which could have easily identified what happened as sexual assault. I only came to terms with that more than ten years later. In other words: Re-reading your diaries also means filling in the blanks. It’s not an accurate representation of your personal history, even though it can be close to that. It’s the story you are willing to tell yourself about your life at that given moment, and it changes over time.
I am a walking contradiction.
Not only will 15,000 pages of diary inevitably be littered with embarrassing opinion on topics you wouldn’t know the first thing about, I was also confronted with the fact that I have changed my mind about questions of style, politics, social relations and preferred housing at least twenty times, sometimes without even realizing. Amplified by my mix of single-minded autism and frayed ADD, I might score higher on this than some of you, but still - whatever it is we strongly believe in today, there is a good chance that it will feel outdated two weeks later. And that, unless we keep a diary, we won’t even notice that we used to feel differently about it. Most of our actions will contradict what we said five or ten years ago, because now we know better. Which in turn means that whoever we are right in this moment will usually be outdated too, in a while. It’s strange to know that. To know that some of what I currently want and care about will be irrelevant to me down the line. I’ve found that once I accepted that more, I was obsessing less about the outcome of things and didn’t take myself too serious anymore - in a good way. Tomorrow is a different day either way.
The gift of forgetting
It takes a lot of personal stability and awareness to be reading through years and years of personal reports on friendships, dubious projects and mental breakdowns without coming to the conclusion that you, as a human being, fundamentally suck. All your failures, all your prejudices, your illusions and your brave obstinacies will come to light (if you’ve been somewhat honest in your diary in the first place). It’s every therapist’s gold mine - but without a therapist, you might sometimes feel like you’re not really doing so well in life.
The truth is, most people forget most things they’ve ever done, and they’re pretty good at hindsight-contextualizing it into an elaborate and reasonable construct to cover up any potential embarrassment. Instead of dealing with the fact that we all make many, many ‘mistakes’ along the way (aka go through necessary learning processes), it’s more socially acceptable to shush about them. Not so the diary-keeper who, in her bold endeavor to document her courageous fights against injustice and ignorance in the hoi polloi, couldn’t help but accidentally also document how wrong she was about most of those things. All of this in written form, forever imprinted onto the patient pages of a fancy notebook.
I have rarely considered throwing any of my diaries away, ripping out pages or otherwise deleting evidence of my own ‘shortcomings’. In fact, there is this vague idea that parts of them will be published posthumously and people can take away from them what they want. But sometimes, just sometimes, I imagine setting a huge campfire somewhere and burning them. I love my memories, and yet there is a strange burden in them too. You can’t escape your past quite so easily, and I think sometimes you deserve that chance. We take who we are with us, but we’re not required to take all of it, everywhere, at all times. Some of the events that I clearly remember because I’ve written them down are already forgotten by everyone else who was a part of it. It’s sad sometimes - but also relieving.
Mind you, forgetting is not the same as ignoring. What’s there is there, and there are things in life that will always play a role, no matter how long ago they happened or how hard someone is trying to deny that they did. But neither do I have to remember every single time I have been humiliated by other people, nor do I have to remember all horrifying details of months of living with ME/CFS. It’s okay to let these memories fade over time. And I guess the same goes for the good things - because you can’t bring them back and comparing them to what is now doesn’t help either. Outside of this marathon re-read, which I won’t be doing again any time soon, I now mostly try to engage with my memories as they come up. It can be physically and emotionally overwhelming to reactivate all of them over such a short period of time and I actually had to take regular breaks to let the emotions play out. The body can’t handle everything at once. Thus, forgetting is part of the process.
Immersion
Lastly, I want to emphasize one thing. Even after practicing on well over 15,000 pages, I have found it impossible to accurately capture any given moment in time in writing, in photos or otherwise. Human memory with all its sensory input is way more complex than that. Diaries help a great deal, but ultimately, in order to truly remember, we have to be present in the moment. The less distracted and dissociated we are, the more immersive the experience. There has been a lot of talk about the experiencing vs. the remembering self. If you want to hear my opinion as a serial diarist, I’d say that as long as you put aside enough time regularly to sort through what happened, whether that’s through journaling or other rituals, the goal should always be to experience. Memories are incredibly precious to me, but ironically, in their fleeting way despite all my documentation, they also prove that life consists not of preserving the past but of shaping and discovering the present. When I look back on those 22 years, it’s … a lot. I feel like I have made use of every possible moment of my life in some way. And that’s a legacy I want to live up to in the now. Which is not to say, do something crazy every day. Actually, I’m looking for more peace in life than I used to. But whatever it is that I choose to do that day, I want to do my best to be present for it in all its complexity. Living is now. Remembering can come later.