1,000 Days
Over this past weekend, I eclipsed 1,000 days of consecutive daily journaling. It was on this blog that I renewed my commitment to the practice, after dabbling with it for years. Now, it’s an essential part of not only my writing process, but my life. It was one of the first items I packed in my carry-on before our move—I might lose all my clothes, but I was not going to lose my journal. And after we arrived, a new bottle of ink (flying with loose ink seemed ill-advised) was one of the first things I bought.
I’d long enjoyed journaling, but perhaps the idea of it more than the practice. I still think some journaling is better than no journaling, and that gaps can be as instructive as full entries; but there’s something different about writing about every day in sequence. It allows you to look at your life on both the micro and macro scales. Most of all, it starts to paint a picture of your life, not only capturing your experiences, but converts them into narrative, sequence, flow.
I'm not quite sure why I started writing a journal. Perhaps it was the influence of Ben Lerner. I'm not sure if Lerner himself is a journaler, but in his novel 10:04 he wrote about a writer who was contacted by a library about archiving his papers. My papers, he thought, (paraphrased). What, like my tweets and word docs? That felt sad to me. I think the truth in that feeling is that we all recognize that there’s something false about tweets, about computer files—and they’re not even tweets anymore, they’re a new, more embarrassing thing.
Beyond just romanticizing, [journaling] feels like a way to take your life more seriously.
Another influence came through the videogame Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which concerns soldiers with limited 10-year lifespans locked in endless conflict. Perpetually facing the end, one character, Mio, talks about her journaling. “I never miss a day!,” she says. That could be me, too, I thought. And then suddenly it was; at times, difficult to maintain, but I felt strongly that I didn’t want to give up so easily.
Writing all this, it’s hard to deny the desire to leave something behind, though I hadn’t really thought of it in that way before. Of course, I don’t expect my journal to be read after I’m gone; and actually the thought of it terrifies me. (This too I think is good—a journal should be written by you, for you; without any restraint. If it’s not terrifying, it’s not close enough.) I’m transparent about my desire to write something great. I want to write a novel I’m proud of, that I feel can sit alongside the works I so value. But I’m not at all concerned about legacy. At best, it seems like something out of my control, and I’m not sure it’s a worthy aim, anyways. As I’ve long said, let me be forgotten.
Instead, it’s the process itself I find value in. There’s something about it that makes it easy to romanticize your own life. The tactility of a notebook certainly helps, and the thoughtfully-designed journals from Hobonichi I favor goes a long way. No matter how carefully I do it, each time I refill my fountain pen, I end up staining my hands with ink in a way I don’t find unpleasant. It feels good to sit down and unwrap my leather journal cover, uncap and then post my fountain pen, and then think carefully about my own life.
Just being physical flips some sort of switch for me. Fleeting, pointless, stupid as it may be, something about making a physical note feels better than doing the same thing on my phone, on my computer. Almost all my photos are digital now, but I think there’s an undeniable aura about film photography that comes in part from its materiality.
With writing notes or journal entries, making them physical makes them more real to me. There’s something about externalizing the thoughts, putting ink on paper, that feels like more of a commitment than adding a line in a document on a computer. Beyond just romanticizing, it feels like a way to take your life more seriously. To commit something to paper that is important to you, even if it's not important to anyone else; maybe especially.
There are tons of ways to journal, and I think the method you choose changes something about how you think of it. It could be a means of tracking to-do list items, a project over a long period, or something focused on a specific aspect of your life, like a log of what you ate or the birds you saw. The Hobonichi is a techo, a planner, ostensibly for filling out the details of your upcoming schedule as much as reflecting on what’s already passed.
For me, I just write out a paragraph, front to back, enough to fill the tiny A6 page. I try and recount what happened in a day, largely linearly, alongside my thoughts and feelings from over the course of the day. Like all the writing I do, it’s through the process of writing that I can understand what it was I felt in a given moment, zoom out to see myself with the added distance of a couple of hours.
I don’t write with any specific goal in mind, like trying to increase my “productivity,” or anything like that. But still, patterns emerge. I can see when I haven’t been living up to my own standards, or see areas I want to work on, things I want to improve about myself. I rarely go back to journal entries, but I’ve started tagging entries that I realize have taken on more significance over time. There was an entry from last year where I wrote about wanting to get out of my comfort zone; an early precursor to my current stage in life.
I still keep a little log of every day I journal. At first, this was an encouragement to continue the pace, but now, the habit long since established, serves just to see how far I’ve come. In that way, it’s like the journal itself. I can look back and see just how much has changed over the past year, the past 500, 1,000 days. And I can only speculate about where I’ll be 1,000 days from now.
Have you ever kept a journal? Have you stuck with it? What's your process like? Let me know!
