Do Journalkeepers Have to be Lonely?

I think not, so I'm doing something new.

I started keeping a daily journal in the seventh grade, when a friend told me I should. I’d tried to keep a diary before— many times, actually, from the novelty notebooks distant relatives sent as well-intentioned holiday gifts to the expensive journals with sprayed edges I begged my parents to buy for me at the local bookstore— but the habit never stuck. A few days in, I’d run out of things to say, or the inconvenience of handwriting in the lamplight before bed would tempt me to skip an entry, or I’d just forget, and that would be that. This, I thought, would be no different.

So I’m not sure why, one regular day towards the end of seventh grade, the pattern broke. I didn’t change anything from prior attempts; it was a plain, simple journal where I recorded the events of my day and my thoughts on said events. Sometimes I included doodles. I wrote with a pencil, not a pen, and always I wrote in the evenings just before bed, never in the morning or afternoon. The habit stuck with me for a week, then another, then a month, a few months, longer.

The friend who told me to start my journal exited my life quite ungracefully the next June,¹ and I kept writing anyway; in fact almost none of the people who featured as recurring characters early on have remained in the pages. I kept writing. I continue to do so.

Over the past eight years— eight years!— I’ve filled a small bookshelf’s worth of journals, and I’ve never skipped a night without making it up hastily the next morning. The content has changed a bit, obviously; I’ve gone from middle school to high school to college and then onwards since those first few entries. But the pages house the same soul as the worried seventh-grade girl who started the whole matter.

I like to think I’m a better writer now. My poeticism is cohesive, I hope, and less overdone. I’m not as dramatic as before— not that it wasn’t warranted then— and I have a more solid understanding of abstraction and concrete detail, and which I want to use, and when, and why. The primary goal is the same: catalogue my days, mostly so that I can remember them, with a side interest in making sense of it all. I still write only in the evenings, only with a pencil, only on real paper, never typed. I have grown and I am the same, et cetera et cetera et cetera ad infinitum.

What I’ve never really done, though, is publish anything I’ve written in my journals.² An obsessive fear has always run through me that if I have the idea of publication in my mind, then what I write will, consciously or not, become more palatable, theatrical, intricate, fake. I do not wish for my journals to be anything other than real; their intended audience will always, first and foremost, be me.

It’s been a long time, though, and I’ve come quite a ways in terms of managing obsessive fears. I’ve learned to evaluate the judgments of others as secondary to my own; I act on my own terms, as a person and writer alike. And when I think of myself at age thirteen or fourteen, figuring out how to write and act and live all for the first time and all at once, I imagine I’d have been relieved if I discovered I’d embraced the poetics, the voice, the Cara of it all, eight years on.

So I’m doing something about it— something new.

Every other month, I’ll pick a different theme or image and gather excerpts from my journals that fit it, then make an essay-ish poem-ish thing out of it to publish here on my blog. Journoetry? Notes from Caraworld? I’m still workshopping the name. But here it will be, every other month, for you to make sense of. You’ll be happy to know, too, that on the off-months, I’ll publish a photo post, not unlike the “Advice from Plants” essay I published a few weeks ago. These alternating posts, journal entries and photos, will go up on the third Friday of each month; that means next week you can expect the first of the Not-so-Lonely Journalkeeper’s Pages³— definitely not calling it that— to feature on the blog.

Other than that, it’s back to your regularly scheduled programming: nonsense personal essays or vignettes or strange weird maybe-poetry, plus a soundtrack for all that on the last Friday of the month. Sound good? I hope so.

Because there’s a lonely, worried journalkeeper’s heart beating behind my own, younger and louder, smudging the graphite of every pencil I hold as she tries to get a glimpse at the words I keep scrawling, wondering if the life on the page is anything like what she imagines, if it’s poetic, if, somehow, it could be real. For her, I’m going to do it regardless.

Me, having travelled alone to a new place, on the hunt for wild poetry. And it looks like I’ve found some, too.

1. If you know, you know. I hope she’s having a great Pride Month. (She definitely isn’t.)

2. My greatest fear as a writer is to become well-known enough to have them be deemed literarily worthy enough to publish. I do not want to be Emerson or Woolf or any other victim of private thoughts made public; anything I write in my journals is for me, and a few select friends (the identities of whom are outlined in my actual real life will and testament, yes this is so serious to me, shoutout to my philosophy professor Dr. Evans for making me write a will and testament and thus prompting me to think about this, I could go on, I’ll stop here), alone.

3. No one’s gonna get this reference, I fear. Oh, Seven Birds, you’ll always be important. To me.