EXPRESS YOURSELF
Journaling Is a Good Way to Figure Out Who You Are
It creates a record of your life that’s for you and you alone.
I’ve been keeping notebooks since I was in elementary school, but I became a full-fledged journaler in my senior year of high school. I was taking a class about modernism and postmodernism with my favorite teacher, Mr. Cho, and we were required to maintain notebooks, which we would turn in for a grade at the end of the semester.
As a major teacher’s pet, and a teenager having a great time exploring her budding passion for art and writing, I went hard with my notebook. I didn’t just write my thoughts about The Trial by Franz Kafka, or Civilization and Its Discontents. I chronicled my anxieties about writing, about being a teenager and a girl and a person in this world. I doodled, drew, and made collages.
Even in a situation where I explicitly had to share my notebook with someone else, journaling was a release, a creative way to work out my ideas about the world and my life, to expel my despair and enthusiasm onto a blank piece of paper, raw and unpolished, but also, aesthetically pleasing and funny.
After I graduated and went to college, journaling became part of my everyday life. Now, in 2022, I have dozens and dozens of notebooks that form a record of my life, the ways in which I have changed and also, stayed exactly the same, hundreds and hundreds of pages that reveal the recurring themes of my existence on the planet earth.
My notebooks from 2012 to 2015 are especially dark, a record of my struggles with depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and overwhelming self-hatred. Reading them alongside my journals from more recent years reveals just how much I’ve grown and changed, in big ways and small. I used to binge drink on the regs. I used to draw a lot of pictures of penises and write the word “CUNT” everywhere, because I wanted to be edgy. I was SO insecure. Nowadays, my drawings are more R-rated than X, and I can’t remember the last time I wrote an entry about what a piece of shit I secretly am.
But really, I don’t need a journal to remind me that I’ve changed, and frankly, reading suicidal diary entries I wrote when I was 19 makes me cringe. The nicest thing about going through my old journals, I’ve come to see, is realizing the ways in which I have stayed the same. I think everybody struggles with the question of “who am I?” Upwards of a dozen years of journals gives me some answers.
Exhibit A: In an entry from 2010 or 2011, I wrote about my Jewishness, how growing up in New York City, I never thought much about being a Jew, but that experiencing light antisemitism and having other people point out my Jewishness made me think differently about my identity, and more strongly connected to it. This is something I still write and think about to this day, and until I happened upon this entry, I had no memory of reflecting upon this at all when I was in high school.
Exhibit B: In that same journal, I wrote an entry about choking on water while swimming in the bay on Fire Island, an experience I wrote about last week on Medium. I didn’t realize that this memory was also important to me when I was 16.
Exhibit C: In 2014, I wrote a dumb poem called “The Sex and the City Psychic” that begins, “I’m no psychic / but I can totes tell whether you’re a Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, or Charlotte / as soon as I meet you...” Next to it, I doodled pictures of Olaf from Frozen, creating my own character, Klaus, Olaf’s alt brother who loves conceptual art. That sort of ridiculousness very much remains my shit.
The generations that grew up on social media understand the tremendous downside of having a digital record of your life for public consumption, so in today’s world, keeping a detailed record of the best and ugliest parts of yourself might seem like a dicey proposition. What makes a journal so special is that it’s private, for you and you alone. It’s a good way to work out who you are without anybody else watching, and there’s something really special about writing for an audience of one.
