History will remember me as a mess
If my journals are any indication. Plus, a couple gamed the lottery, Jacqueline Novak's breathless comedy special, and more.
Issue #46 — Since late last year, I’ve been pretty disillusioned with the idea of journaling. This is a noteworthy break in my usual nature. I’ve been journaling on and off since I was about 17 and started a diary in a fit of annoyance at my parents.
I wanted to keep detailed notes of what I experienced and how I felt about it all, at 17, so that I could one day look back on it and tap into the angst of being a teenager. I didn’t want the depth of feeling to become foreign to me. I thought about becoming a parent and handing a stack of my journals to my kids, so they could hold me accountable and say, “See? You felt exactly how I’m feeling when you were my age.”
But there was this tendency with my journals. For a while, I’d only take to them when I was upset. The result was notebooks full of anger and very little information about the regular, day to day happenings. To address this negative pattern, I decided I’d write about happy stuff, too. I’d express my gratitude more often.
But, as we know, happiness is a less powerful motivator than anger. I’d go for long periods without writing anything, only cracking my diary open when something really interesting or complicated happened.
Writing has always helped me sort through my feelings, and find the words for thoughts that mostly appear in my mind as images or blurry-edged emotions. It’s always been simpler for me to write about an experience than to talk about it.
At 16, when my abuela told my mom that I should see a psychologist because I’d taken apart my bed frame and put my mattress on the floor, I aired out my confusion and frustration in a notebook. Looking back now, that was such a funny (and Cuban) thing to say. I just wanted a Tumblr girl bedroom! But at the time, it tapped into feelings of being misunderstood, craving independence and the freedom to design my bedroom exactly as I wanted.
Journaling sharpens my thoughts and guides me back to some core truths. When I’m overwhelmed, the act of locking myself in a room alone and pouring it all out on a page gets me back to running on an even keel.
That’s all still true. But a diary-keeping routine that includes both the boring detritus of life and the big feelings and the juicy anecdotes? I haven’t found the right approach.
Like any writer, I’m good at finding excuses for not writing. I thought the issue must be my tools: this notebook’s too stiff at the seam, this ballpoint requires too much force. I ran through different varieties, tried every size of Moleskin. I found my perfect pen, from MUJI (iykyk). Still no dice.
Or maybe it’s the time of day, I thought — knowing perfectly well this was not the problem. Before bed? First thing in the morning, as Julia Cameron proselytizes? Morning pages worked for a few months, but neither stuck in the long run. I tried to find my perfect pocket, embarking on a Green Eggs and Ham-type quest: I wrote on my phone, on my laptop, in a single running Word document, in a dated Google Doc, on loose leaf paper. In bed, at the dining room table, even on the toilet. Dictating it, recording a video in Photo Booth (by far the worst). In a plane, on a train, in a coffee shop. Illustrated, bullet-pointed, as a screenplay.
“The issue with my journaling in the morning is that my sleeves are always damp from when I washed my face and put my contacts on. Without fail.”
— Journal entry from Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023
This gnawing project would only become more urgent as I’d learn of the journaling habits of literary greats, or the obsessive daily logs John Wilson keeps, or even the simple bedtime routine my friend, Tommy Tomlinson, has. I adore the idea of reflection as a daily practice. I dream of my descendants revisiting my life through beautifully kept notebooks, something I wish I had to learn about my ancestors. I think my notes could be a useful part of the historical record — I lived through a pandemic! — if only I was more disciplined about it.
But then there’s the nitty-gritty: How do people remember to do it everyday? What if you have nothing to say or you’re exhausted? How does someone get motivated to write down the menial tasks they did every day?
And how much more value does that kind of comprehensive writing have as compared to my patchwork approach: 10K words in one week, and then 0 words for four months?
Having gone in search of some artists’ diary habits for this piece, I laugh when I find Joan Didion’s On Keeping A Notebook, in which she writes:
“At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about ‘shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed’? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this ‘E’ depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?”
I’m especially fascinated by the personal (an imperfect word, considering all writing is excruciatingly of a person) writing habits of professional writers. How to create that separation between the work and the diary.
For fiction writers, what does that look like? I’d imagine everything moves between the two pools: the painstakingly crafted story and the uncontrollable autobiography, perpetually feeding into one another.
Like Anthony Doerr’s diary from a trip to Rome: a sprawling thing, a daily practice that could consume three hours — “the journal-writing took over my fiction-writing and became the craft I spent most of my time on,” he says — and later became his book, Four Seasons In Rome.
I think of Susan Sontag’s diaries, which probably helped her purge the first drafts of ideas, to flush out watered down drafts of things which she could later build on, enrich, reconstruct more firmly for her published works.
“The word on the page may not reveal (may conceal) the flabbiness of the mind that conceived it…All thoughts are upgrades — get more clarity, definition, authority, by being in print — that is, detached from the person who thinks them.”
Susan Sontag’s journal from 1964, excerpted in The Marginalian
In some non-fiction, as in journalism, the boundaries feel pretty clear. Ethics demand that we maintain a barrier between the self and the work in order to protect against conflicts of interest, or the appearance of impropriety. Still, there’s an intangible essence that moves between me and my words, if all goes well, no matter the context. The work should always read like its maker had a pulse.
And that pulse is sustained by any kind of written expression, even diary-keeping or letter-writing or pulling together a newsletter. The very act of externalizing what’s inside one’s head lends momentum to other kinds of written work. When I’m stuck on one piece, I can switch to another and avoid interrupting the flow of creative energy. The reverse is also true: a freeze in one area can spread to everything else — to me, these are the most demoralizing episodes of all.
So wouldn’t it be beneficial to maintain a constant practice of writing in a journal, and through that a reliable stream of creative force?
The dilemma is this: I’ve yet to find a method of journaling that keeps me from overanalyzing my life experiences.
In the journal, I can belabor a point to no end, revisit an interaction and dissect it ad infinitum. I can think I’m making sense of things by writing a narrative that’s so compelling it becomes my truth. It lives on, mostly unquestioned, even thought it was created in the heat of an effort, as an attempt to heave a bitter mood out of my chest.
I’m not so sure the stories we tell ourselves self-correct without intervention. Sometimes the best approach is to leave things unexamined and give feelings time to move through us and out of us without interference. For me, that means turning to the journal less.
So this is my issue with the diary routine. The consistency question. And boredom at myself and what makes up my daily life (a lot of it’s just sitting at a desk), interspersed with an unflattering tilt toward self-absorption.
I envy the level-headed documentarian who can glance at his life from a safe distance within the notebook. I admire the committed journal-er jotting down the day’s agenda before drifting off to sleep. And also, I’ve come to accept myself as a finicky spigot. I run dry for some months, and process more in my head or in conversation than I do on the page. And maybe that’s good: a diversified portfolio of outlets. And it’ll probably all come flooding out mid-April, anyway, filling another half-notebook.
As I’ve been telling friends, to quote Zora Neale Hurston: There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
That, too, is a suggestive part of the self-archive. The inconsistency of a diary is as solid a record of personality, temperament and interests as any written reflection. My switch between styles, notebooks, pens and locations says a lot. It reveals a truth.
When my great-grands crack open my dusty old journals, they might find a mess. A wilted lily preserved in duct tape, with a nondescript caption: From Lawson, 2021, Santa Cruz. They’ll see a receipt from a plate of fried fish I ate alone one New Year’s Eve. A quick summary of a trip with friends. My back-burnered anxieties about motherhood, a longitudinal study of my deepest insecurities (my old journals reveal they haven’t changed much to date). Whoever reads my diaries will know about the asshole shopkeeper who told me to mind my own business when I asked where he sourced his “artisan” flannel shirts. They’ll be confused by the major life events that went unmentioned in favor of minor frustrations laid out in great detail. All my moods and seasons, with gaps of silence in between.
Through my chaotic, imperfect autobiography, maybe they’ll see me.
Recommendations
If you’re looking for a diary refresh, here’s a roundup of different styles journaling. Lately, I’ve been copying a friend’s method to see if it sticks: jotting down a few sentences of what I did each day into my planner.
The Philosophy of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe. I came across this essay while trying to understand how Poe, who was a journalist and magazine editor, dealt with (or pulled inspiration from) real-life events into his fiction. In Philosphy, he explains how he wrote “The Raven,” and takes some funny shots at other writers who refuse to lift the veil on their process. “Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought.”
Jacqueline Novak’s frenetic, obscene, and lyrical Netflix comedy special, “On Your Knees.” The year is but a month old and yet this special has been dubbed one of the best of 2024. Maybe that’s because it was honed over the course of many years, evolving from theatrical stand-up in various cities (a friend of mine saw Novak do it in Boston) before reaching its final Netflix form. It feels like a feat just to work with the same material for so long, but watching Novak onstage, it makes sense. She’s doing a different kind of comedy: running a marathon in front of a live audience. She does not hesitate, she knows each word and places it exactly where it should be. It feels more like a one-woman play, a piece she could do while half-asleep, and yet the special carries that invigorating energy of art created on the fly. It’s the funniest special I’ve seen since Atsuko Okatsuka’s “The Intruder” on HBO, and one of the most original, and best written, I’ve ever watched. The L.A. Times has a write-up.
Natasha Lyonne’s winding, revealing, and very Lyonnan interview with Conan. I needed footnotes to catch all her references. She directed Novak’s comedy special, and listening to this interview, it’s easy to see the comedic/intellectual resemblances that would draw them together.
OK, enough about writing. A decade ago, an ill-fated Groundhog’s Day celebration set off a universe of conspiracy theories after Bill de Blasio dropped the animal onstage. Love this whole thing.
A math whiz in Michigan cracked the code to winning the state’s lottery by identifying a flaw in the game. This story is delightful.
Emma Stone was on Fresh Air, talking about the deep anxiety she’s had since childhood and how it actually benefits her work. She’s had a great run as of late.
Stanley Cup lead crisis-question-mark. You already know I’m obsessed with the rise of this drinking receptacle. But new allegations of lead contamination — which seem to be mostly overblown, or at least not unique to Stanley — are a dramatic twist I did not see coming! Is this the beginning of the fall of the house of Stanley? Will other popular cup-makers come under scrutiny? And is #WaterTok accidentally starting the revolution over PFAS and other contaminants in our drinking water?
Have a great week,
Isa
Rummaging is written by Isa Cueto and edited by Annie Cappetta. To support our work and get every new edition in your inbox, subscribe.