On April 30th, 2005, I wrote my first dated journal entry. It is nothing special: a petty childhood grievance about a friend. I was 11 years old. The entry is in the midpoint of the notebook, which until that day had been a place exclusively for fiction. I was writing animal stories; attempting to match the tone of the fables and fantasies I had read. Talking foxes, wise old owls, societies of unicorns. The entry's significance lies only in the fact that I never stopped.
I remember having semantic hang-ups. I was opposed to the word “diary.” Perhaps because diary brought to mind the tacky notebook toys advertised on TV—lockable, plastic, password-protected. Girly preteens hiding details about their crushes from nosy little brothers. Diaries were silly and insubstantial. So I kept a journal.
Fiction quickly faded, and the journal became primarily a log of life. Every so often I write an entry that critiques my journal-keeping. It’s not pretty enough. I don’t take enough time to make quality sentences. I don’t describe enough, and the things I do describe are badly done. I am a bad writer. The entries that really make my heart ache are the ones that consist only of scribbles on the page, forceful actions done in anger—sometimes hard enough to make holes in the paper. I had no words for my frustration. Now I'd call it the frustration of wanting to improve.
As a teenager, I gathered all of the journals and reinforced their spines with packing tape. They were very special to me. I always said I would save them first in a fire. Now, I’m not so sure—the more that accumulate, the more difficult saving them becomes; the more suspicious I get of being too attached to objects—but I still love them, and will take care of them for as long as they exist.
I didn’t just write: I also revisit the journals. At milestones, when I feel down, when I need to make a decision. I think this writing-and-rereading has given me a close relationship with myself. I have seen myself appear again and again, on the page, through time, and felt for her. And, of course, it gave me lots of practical writing experience. Although there’s a sort of shameful feeling that comes with getting absorbed in your journal—not to mention the cringe. Virginia Woolf says it best:
“I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat.”
More about semantics: I also had a problem with the word “book.” I aspired to be the author of a book one day, but until then, I would write stories. I noticed that others used the term interchangeably: I am writing a book. The way I saw it, one did not write a book. One wrote a story that might become a book—if it was worthy.
Worthiness aside, this first journal is where I set my goal: I want to publish a book by the time I’m 35 years old. Pretty measured for a sixth grader. I appreciate how much time she gave me. (She must have really wanted to succeed.)