WHY I JOURNAL

It was while writing a diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments.

Anaïs Nin

I journal simply because I need to. I’ve kept a journal off-and-on, since I was about 11. I suppose that’s long and obstinate enough to be classed as a well formed habit! Keeping a journal is also grounding and cathartic in equal measures. Admittedly, my journal is part notebook, part mental repository and part memory keeper. But that is the essence of a journal. The subjectivity - it can be just about anything a person wants it to be.

I know I seem to be constantly quoting Susan Sontag lately, but the woman made a lot of sense. She too kept journals btw, and the insight she unpacks on the subject, well they mean a lot to me…

“ Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.”
— Susan Sontag

Journaling enables me to capture impressions of my present life in a more natural way. Words flow sometimes in synchronicity with my thoughts, other times they fall out, unsupervised and their honesty catches me off guard. No one will ever look at my journals, and I like that. There is no performance in them. So perhaps that is where the sense of freedom lies? I am free to relinquish any appearance of order to the pandemonium that resides in my journals. Crammed with photos, clippings, collages, half ideas, disjointed musings. A chaotic blur of despair, anxiety, goofy things and good things too. I even go as far as doing away with respect for chronological order. It’s my way - no excuse, no apology.

I will leave you with this morsel from Maria Popova (one of my favourite living, breathing and still kicking-ass writers)…

“Journaling, I believe, is a practice that teaches us better than any other the elusive art of solitude — how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives. ”
— Maria Popova

New Year, New Diary!

“However thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”
— Mary Gordon

Although I use my iPhone to organise my life and the various goings on with my kids, I usually have a paper diary on the go too. There’s something about the act of writing something down that solidifies a thought in my consciousness in a way that is unachievable with an app. The process of picking up a pen and putting it to paper to commit thoughts into words in a tangible form is an act of creativity. It feels so much more human to write rather than type.

Midori Paper Diary Japanese Stationery

I use the MD Paper Notebook Diary. I’ve been a loyal MD Paper Notebook fan for around a decade so it feels natural to follow suit with my diary. Aside from habit, there are many good things about the diary for me:

  • The paper quality. It’s smooth and lovely to write on with ball pen, ink and pencil.

  • I like the format. It’s split between monthly planners spreads and notepaper.

  • The monthly view leaves a generous blank space that borders the calendar. I like using this space for extra notes, thoughts, stickers etc. I like how they “frame” a month.

  • I like the simple clean presentation of the book. I like the binding and the blind embossed logo.

  • Supplied with label stickers to help with organising and filing.

  • It’s reasonable and great value for money.

While I am on the subject of handwritten diaries, I want to mention Mary Gordon’s brilliant essay “ Putting Pen to Paper, but Not Just Any Pen to Just Any Paper”. It was published in 2001 in an anthology entitled; Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times. Her essay not only resonates on many levels with my thinking on handwriting as as act of creativity and mindfulness, but it encapsulates so many thoughts that I find difficult to articulate.

“Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”
— Mary Gordon