In December of 1980, when I was 11 years old, I started keeping a diary. I was feeling sorry for myself because the band instructor had scheduled a test for the day I was supposed to go to the once-a-week gifted and talented program. My dad was unsympathetic; Mom understood, but didn't have an answer for me. So I grabbed a notebook, and one way or another I've never stopped.
I didn't bother with bound books with tiny keys; I wrote in plain spiral notebooks, at first just leftovers that still had blank pages at the end of the school year. It took a while for me to get into the habit of writing regularly, but by my junior year of high school I was filling a new five-subject notebook every year or so. I never tried to hide it from my parents, but honestly, my diary was spectacularly boring, so it really didn't matter that I just kept it on my bedside table next to a stack of novels.
I kept it up all the way through college and grad school, my unfortunate period of unemployment--though there was a gap of about six months when I didn't write anything that wasn't related to the reruns of
Quantum Leap I was watching on cable TV--and my years at bookstores and the library. And then I started trailing off again, leaving more and more time between entries. I skipped a couple of months once this year, and picked up again with a note to self that I'll have to write the year on every entry now. I've been writing in the same notebook, volume 25, since the middle of 2007, and I still have a lot of blank pages to go.
I blame Xanga for the fact that I stopped writing chatty, newsy personal letters to my friends once I started blogging, because all the amusing stories I used to save up for letters started going to feed the blog instead. I don't think I can blame it for the demise of my diary, though. For the first few years I just wrote different stuff in my diary: whatever I didn't want to throw out on the internet for any schmo with a modem to read.
This year one of my New Year's resolutions was to write in my diary every day, and to that end I splurged on a bound book, though not one with a lock--a red page-a-day
"daily reminder" Standard Diary with the year embossed in gold on the cover. And I have written at least a sentence or two in that nearly every day, even if I did have to resort to reporting the weather once or twice. I think that's what's finally killed my compulsion to write in my other diary, the spiral notebook; sometimes it's such a stretch to come up with a sentence or two for the red book before bedtime that I just can't think of anything I'd like to sit up late and expand on.
That may be what killed my blog, too. I don't know. I wish it had left me one or the other, because I think I need the outlet; I've been less depressed since I posted how depressed I was.
Comments (5)
I was a big spiral-notebook keeper too. Now I only do the blog. It can be slightly different from the diary and maybe something is lost, but it's a little more sociable this way. I try to do the blog daily, even if I have nothing to say. I don't do "issue blogging" too often. From time to time I feel like ranting about something, but I would have done that in the spiral anyway. The downside to the blog: I log onto it a zillion times a day out of boredom, so it sucks a lot more time out of my life than the spiral did.
I have a box of those journals with the pretty covers that you buy....and a box of spiral notebooks, both small and large.
Now I write almost entirely online...but I think there is something special about pen to paper and I attempt that every now and again.
I miss reading your writings here - so you have one reader that is always pleased to see something from you!
I freewrite every morning now when I get up. Without that, I would not survive my day!
Dang. I missed my calling! I knew your powerful communication skills would be a great outlet.
And do like I plan to do. Print your blog posts and keep them in a folder. Et voila. A journal (on paper).