Journals, online and off

In 1990, I started my first print journal.

For the first year or two, I mostly wrote entries when I was aggravated with my siblings. About half of my entries thus read, roughly: "[sibling] did [x]. [sibling] is stupid. I hate [sibling]. At least [sibling] will have to suffer being stupid [his/her] whole life whereas I will be rich and famous and awesome and married to Edward Scissorhands. Haha." The other half of my entries? Those were about my future marriage to Edward Scissorhands.

Pretty please do me a favor and avoid calculating my age based on the above? Let's just all agree I was about eight years old and move right along.

Over the next couple of years, my entries started gaining a little nuance. I won't say I didn't obsess about crushes or rant about my siblings and/or mom. I surely did. Those entries simply slowly gave way to more earnest, seeking entries. I began using my journal as a place to reflect on my life and future absent the cacophony surrounding me day-to-day. Many of the entries were negative, which is funny since I was such a cheerful youth (you don't seriously believe that, do you?), but occasionally I'd bust out neutral or even joyful sentiments. Sometimes, happily, I took the time to say kind or thoughtful things about (ever-changing factions among) my family:

I love three people: me, Rachael, and Mom. (Unlike Rachael!) How could I not love mom? I couldn’t not love her. I can not even say how much. And I respect her very much. I like the stickers Mom got us. Being poor is so hard on her. Especially since we always want more than we can have. That’s just how it is, though. --2/14/1993

In 1995, I started a "public journal" comprised of txt files broken down by month and year. With a few short exceptions, I kept that journal online till I started law school in 2001. That "public journal" saw me through the summer following my high school graduation, college, Orcalab, a few months in Korea and a move--via Greyhound--to Los Angeles, where I'd be attending law school despite the absolute fiscal nonsense of it. When I deleted my public journals, I swore I was done with electronic journals. But wait, what's this? LiveJournal? Well, I suppose I could try it. Just this once.

Over the years, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words online and off. Writing these words helped me to find both my voice and my ability to reason. If there was something I couldn't work out anywhere else, I'd write myself through it. Writing was the process by which I tuned out all the rest of the world and honed in on a single point, allowing myself to work that point through to its conclusion so that, for a little while, I'd feel like there was some order and predictability to the world.

After a while, writing in my journal wasn't something I thought about. It was just something I did. I didn't ever figure I'd go back through my old entries. In fact, the writing was about the process, and hoooooo-boy! Were there ever processes I didn't intend ever to revisit!

Then, a few months ago, I decided it was time to pore through every single entry I'd ever written, anywhere. I did this after it hit me that I'd never make another new memory with my mom ever again. I wondered if I might find in the pages of my journals memories that I'd forgotten, so that in reading about them I'd feel like they were new.

This was indeed the case. Over the course of several weeks, I rediscovered many joyful memories not only of my mom, but also of my siblings, old friends and a handful of people I don't think I'd be able to identify properly if I were given a line-up of two totally dissimilar people to choose from. As I read through those entries, I thought about what a loss it would have been to never have recorded these moments in the first place. This is so whether they were recorded in my own handwriting or digitally.

15 or 16 years ago, a stranger commented to me that he never thought he'd see something so human as my public journal come out of a machine. But as I read through all my old entries, I felt a sense of loss at how my handwritten entries were slowly being replaced by typed ones. I can type more quickly than I can write, to be certain. Yet I wonder, am I saying as much? Or am I simply saying more? I'm inclined to believe the latter. Half my life ago, through the slow, tedious act of writing by hand, I was forced to seriously consider my every word before marking it down. Each word I selected was specific and precise, or at least more apt to be than a word in an electronic entry. When I started shifting toward typing, I could get a whole lot more out in a whole lot less time, and it showed.

It's time for me to get back to my roots, so to speak. I'm committed to filling another print journal. Then another. And another.

As I type this, my toddler son is alternately coughing and singing in his sleep. As he does, I find myself thinking of how there's so, so much left to say. For me, for him, for posterity. I'd rather it be offline, when possible. Like when I was 16, there's just so much noise in my life now. I need that time writing it all out by hand to slowly and fastidiously find my way back to my heart.

Does that mean I'm gonna keep it all offline? You decide for yourself, given the medium of this entry.

I trust you'll realize you'll never see me online again!