I keep a journal, and have since around 2000 when I was 11 going on 12.
It’s sort of a compulsion: I need to keep a record of my life. In middle school, I used it to detail every interaction with teachers and classmates at school, list every animal I saw at a trip to the zoo, and record every cute thing my guinea pigs did that day.
In high school I used it to panic about my grades, process my crushes, and worry over my looks. Throughout my 20s I recorded rough drafts of poems, failed dating relationships, and the journey of my diagnosis with an autoimmune disease. I wrote about my writing goals and my ultimate dream of moving “up north” someday.
As I recently wrote through the decade following my diagnosis for the first draft of a memoir, my journals were an irreplaceable resource. While going through that process, surrounded by the notebooks holding a written record of my life so far, I learned a lot about what was useful to me in the present day about those journals from the distant and recent past.
While I’m not thinking about future usefulness or putting expectations on journaling—that would defeat the purpose—I do now look at it a little differently. There are things I now try to pay attention to more closely, to be sure to record. I am sharing them today, along with some select excerpts from my own journals through the years.
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