Journaling: The Songs of Ourselves
When we put our ideas in writing, we’re taking dictation from the echo chamber of our thoughts and giving it form in a different medium. Yet what we do isn't always what we teach. When young children begin learning the language arts, we immediately focus their writing on correct spelling, legible penmanship, standardized grammar, and coherent expression. This assumes an intent of writing to communicate. But there’s another possibility that’s often overlooked: writing as a means of explaining ourselves to ourselves.
On Reflection
Throughout the history of written language, people have kept journals. Many were scientists, artists, leaders, and believers. Many others were just private, literate individuals compelled to set their thoughts on a page. These writings might later become the basis for philosophical treatises, memoirs, and works of fiction. Yet most journals were likely never intended to be shared with anyone. They were a means for the writer to step back and, as a reader, revisit their thoughts at a later time.
In recent decades, journaling has been reimagined as a practice for supporting personal wellness, focused on benefits like articulating our goals, reflecting on our growth, and exploring our inspirations. We might track our fitness and diet, summarize the events of our day, or record our dreams. Long before I heard about this kind of self-communion as something desirable or fashionable, I was driven to capture the sound of my own thinking and narrate the story of myself.
The Safety Valve
Shortly before turning 13, I started a diary to report the social nightmare of my school days. Nobody else wanted to hear this stuff, but I had to release my seething emotional ferment somehow. Much of it was along the lines of “I did/didn’t… then they said… then I said… but I should have said…” That teetering, unbalanced load of self-pity and self-awareness was probably useful to a point (years later, someone compared my diary voice to “a young Philip Roth”), but it also became a trap, tying me to a single, tedious narrative instead of giving me the freedom to grow my ideas.
I’d already been writing fiction for years and knew that I had to move beyond this self-obsession. My wannabe song lyrics were an insufficient vehicle. Concurrent with the diary, I started another two trains of written thought that were more subject-specific. One was a set of personal memories and associations triggered by my favorite radio station’s annual list of the Top 100 Songs. I did this enthusiastically for two years and reluctantly for a third year. The second category, far more sparing and cautious in its entries, was a chronicle of my timid love life. Instructive, I guess, but oh so embarrassing!
As I tried to break the toxic habit of my diary, I started writing personal essays – impressions of powerful experiences, riffs on current events and culture, unhinged gibberish just for the hell of it – all of which I refused to categorize into anything like a diary. For want of a better home, they ended up in my binder of poetry and lyrics, even though they were neither. My high school years could have been much better self-documented, but I was openly rebelling against a period of unhealthy self-reflection, and this is what I have.
Journaling for an Audience
Sophomore year of high school, I first discovered the bridge to journaling – though I didn’t cross it at the time. My creative writing teacher assigned what he called Thought Cards, which were 5x7 index cards designated for “story ideas.” I was unclear on the concept at first. Did he want the seeds of stories I hadn’t yet written? Two of those per week were beyond me. By observing my classmates, I quickly learned that Mr. Jaeger intended those Thought Cards as a medium for ideas that interested me, worth observing, describing, or riffing on.
I finally crossed that bridge to the practice most people would call journaling during my freshman year of college. My fiction writing prof had us keep a spiral notebook dedicated to whatever we felt like writing about, just to keep the wheels turning. He collected these notebooks a few times during the quarter and returned them with his encouraging reactions penciled in the margins. After a few months of this, I was hooked on a daily practice of reflecting, observing, venting, and letting my thoughts run wild. How hooked, you ask? Well, many years and spiral notebooks later, it’s still part of my day.
Anticipating Professor Drake’s penciled comments has long since shifted to addressing future scholars of my work. Yes, I admit that I retain a sense of writing for an audience - however fictional it might be! The upside of this amusing paranoia is that, while saying whatever I want to say, I do try to keep it interesting.
Prompted Output
As an adult, I’ve been in situations that invited a higher level of sharing written reflections.
I was in a writing group for a few years with the recurring challenge to free-write little gems of memoir. The idea was to dig deep, recapture something of personal significance, and present it to a circle of trusted writers/listeners who’d developed a group understanding about the hazards and rewards of this self-examination. If I ever write an autobiography, a lot of this stuff would be core material.
Far more amusing was my involvement in “If You Read This, I’ll Have to Kill You,” a
project initiated by two writing coaches who put out a call for long-ago teenage writings from brave adult volunteers. I submitted three
selections: a tragicomic two-week excerpt from my eighth-grade diary; a personal essay detailing a disastrous night from my 16-year-old summer; and one of the final episodes of my love chronicle. (Obviously I changed the names.) My favorite part of the challenge was writing a few retrospective paragraphs to establish context for these otherwise unedited slices of memory. The project coordinators liked what I sent them, possibly because most of their participants were women, and I was one of the few men willing to share. Sadly, they got distracted by their own careers, and nothing ever came of the experiment.
I notice the preceding paragraphs wandering from my premise, so let’s bring it back home. Whether or not you’re a show-off, your journal is ultimately by and for yourself. When you’re flushing out the echo chamber of your churning thoughts, you’re the only audience that matters.
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