Every New Year I am revisited by the idea of keeping a diary, each time with renewed vigor. The thought is often accompanied by a sense of purpose and responsibility; as the years are rolling by, I could surely use the accrual of any wisdom and create a literary record of my life? Even if I never re-read these excerpts from my younger self, it would still create a repository that some future person could use for research and discovery, and possibly amusement.
A daily ritual of noting my thoughts would provide a milestone in the day. “I’m going to get ready for bed, brush my teeth, and then write in my diary” I might think to myself, happy that the remaining few moments in the day are now structured and therefore not to be feared.
The practice of articulating my thoughts in the moment also seems a worthwhile endeavor, given that it is not uncommon to greet the end of a day with emotionally salient confusion – memories of sensory snapshots that happened throughout the day that are still nascent and without description. Indeed, a good diary entry might make me realize what the hell happened in the last fifteen hours. I was there, surely?
But even with these noble and virtuous justifications to pursue the completion of a diary, I still find myself facing the same vicious battle.
The hardest part to starting a diary is knowing how I would begin and how could I possibly know how to begin when it has taken me this many years to arrive at this pivotal moment. I am still lost in the prelude, a prelude that I failed to document anywhere. How can I just begin when there is already much of my life missing?
If we are not born covered in blood, dangling an umbilical cord, and scribbling furiously onto parchment we should just accept that keeping a diary will be a life spent chasing completion.
But I persist past these thoughts, perched with pen in hand, sitting up on my pillows by the glow of the bedside lamp, determined that I should write something before I allow myself to sleep. Yet, I am already struck by the tyranny of the blank page, locked in a staring contest with the clean white rectangle, and the winner seems to be the first one who can throw up.
The intimidation that radiates from the page, daring me to scar its perfect skin with the careless swipe of my pen is overwhelming and increases the demand for writing something good at the first attempt.
Should I just jump right in and start writing about why I have decided to torment myself every night for however long is customary to maintain this habit? And then, what if I don’t like or don’t agree with what I’ve written? Do I put a line through it, scribble over it, use white out, or just tear the page out? What happens if I miss a day, a week, a month, three months?
I’m already breaking out in a cold sweat.
Should I save the blank pages as trophies of my neglect? If the diary is formally printed, the pages would already be labeled accordingly and so I would have no choice. The diary would be documenting my errors and lack of discipline in addition to my hackneyed version of the day’s events. I would feel obliged to pepper any missing blank pages with apologies and promises of writing to come.
“Sorry. I forgot to write something. Check out Saturday where I will provide an update on the side effects of my new medication and my ever present fear of dying alone.”
These apologies would have to be initialed and dated, of course, in keeping up with the theme of documentation.
Am I allowed to write about the past on a page that is titled with today’s date? I don’t know if I’m so bold as to assume I can represent the me from a previous day. I fight to account for my state of mind in the present, let alone bear the neuronal strain of reliving the past.
Confronting a new diary entry appears agonizingly close to the experience of losing one’s virginity. Pressure, the conflicting needs of getting it over with and delaying it for as long as possible, the timidity masquerading as confidence until I can no longer fool myself of my gross ineptitude and lack of command over my organs.
If memories are recreations, will I already be fictionalizing my life? Is that the point? Will writing a diary change the way I see my entire life? Will documenting my life have the paradoxical effect of destroying everything I know about myself?
The more I wrote in the diary, the more I would feel compelled to keep going, scared to miss a day, until it has consumed my life. The incessant need to document and keep up with all the rules I will impose on myself will dehumanize me into a shadow of my former self, and I will be at a loss as to why I keep giving this book more and more of my time and more and more of me.
At the end of every day will be my diary, waiting with its mouth open, ready to suck out more of my soul. And by showing me how much past I have had, it will conversely and no doubt joyously be showing me how much future I do not have.
There must be an ancient language where the word for death is the same as the word for diary.
So, it will remain another undocumented year. I will drink my tea and pretend I’m living forever.
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