I didn’t even look through it before throwing the calendar away. I used to page through them for kicks, to see what I’d written and reflect on how far I’d come. My grandmother made a practice of writing a short note on her calendars as a kind of journal at the end of every day and we still had those in a stack at my uncle’s place and got the one out for 1970 to see what she’d written on the day I was born. All life was whittled down to small things. To grocery lists and doctors appointments and near-miss accidents. Things of little consequence. You could jot it down on a wall calendar if you wanted, but what was the point? We were all cycling down the same path that ended the same way. We were all in various states of delusion fumbling around in the dark, tuning a radio in search of another voice.

A long time ago I stopped writing in my journals. It shifted to my blog and moved from “what I had for breakfast” to “what does breakfast even mean?” And like looking back at old journals, rereading old blogs only yields so much value. The journal is truly for the author and the author only, to claw their way out of the pointlessness of life—or like a crime scene detective, to rifle through the banal clutter of things to find a hidden connection. In this way the journal has very limited value for anyone outside of the author. You could read about Alan Rickman’s life for example, with a foreword by Emma Thompson, and perhaps they had a relationship, and you might learn about the dirt between him and Kenneth Branagh, but it would be raw and unprocessed in the words Alan used to make sense of his own life. And even he couldn’t do that. It would be exposed in a sense. And for that, it would need editing and curating prior to publication. And cease to be a true journal.

I think we journal for a few reasons, namely to make sense of things. Writing about your life elevates it too, gives it more legitimacy. It’s like making a commitment to value your life more just by taking the time to record it. I think I blog/journal in hopes to find more meaning. Or like my grandmother did, to preserve a few small details of my life so I can save it for others when I’m gone. And in that sense you could believe the dead are never really gone, if someone else can still read about their life and imagine what it was like.

But we are all fooling ourselves to think this way. And perhaps that’s okay, perhaps that’s the point. It’s one way to extend ourselves, to leave the riddle of what our lives really mean for someone else to solve.

Categories: musings, writing

Tags: existentialism, journal writing