Journals and Diaries | Written by Gail

I will never succeed at bullet journaling. It’s never going to happen.

This is something I realized recently, after several attempts at the concept. I’m not good at planning ahead, or spending lots of time preparing for something; and bullet journals – at least, the way I’ve seen it handled – takes a lot of time. You need to hand number the pages, and design the layouts in advance. You can’t just sit down and write. You’re keeping track of things, and that means you have to know all of your assignments and grocery lists and whatnot at the moment you’re writing them down, and keep updating it.

failed attempt at bullet journaling. this is the only page that has anything written on it

I write my homework in the note application in my phone, and even then, only if it’s something complex I would forget the details of unless I wrote it down immediately. I’m not going to carry my bullet journal with me at all times just to write down (and this is directly from my phone) “For Icon – Dune, That Hebrew vampire erotica” (books I want to get rid of/sell) or “Litter, Socks, Toothbrush, Various pills” (a to do list). This system is immediate, and can be accessed at all times; this works for me.

I’m not saying bullet journals are a bad thing. I’m just saying that I finally decided to give them up recently. I suck at consistency, I suck at remembering to do things when they’re not immediately available, I suck at planning ahead.

And besides, I’ve been keeping a diary since I was 12.

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“But how?” you might ask, considering I just said I don’t do consistency. But that’s the secret, you see; diaries don’t need consistency. They don’t need to be up to date.

The notebook I currently use as a diary has a beautiful flower pattern that I noticed sometime in early 2016. I used it as a diary starting that summer, after I decided to stop using the previous one at the point of my high school graduation (I felt it was a neat close to that ‘chapter’ in my life). The first date in it is the 12th of August 2016. I wrote in it very sparingly every few weeks or so for the next few months, until the 27th of February 2017.

The next entry is the 17th of March 2018.

Yes, more than a year had passed since I had written a single entry in my diary. The opening of that entry reads as follows: “The last time I seriously kept a diary was in the 12th grade. The first few pages in this notebook do not count. […] I didn’t so much decide to stop as much as I forgot so often I forgot.”

current diary – it’s meant to be written from right to left, not left to right, so the bookmark sticks out from the top

It’s not that nothing happened to me in the entirety of 2017. In fact, that was an incredibly challenging year, the first time I was out of a school framework since I could remember myself. I got a job, and I studied for and then took the Israeli version of the SATs, and I saw friends and had the worst week of my life, which I’ll still be processing at the end of my life.

But the diary didn’t care that I hadn’t written in it. There was no prep work involved. I simply picked up the notebook a year later and continued writing for myself.

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That’s what I love about diaries, compared to bullet journals. When I was journaling, I felt like I was doing it for an imaginary audience. It had to be aesthetic and immaculate; it had to be orderly and photogenic. But my thoughts are not orderly or photogenic. They’re messy. It isn’t the daily minutiae that I care about, but the feelings that come with the strangely freeing yet difficult experience of making my own schedule, my strangely detailed dreams, what it’s like finally owning a cat after dreaming of getting one for years and years (it’s fantastic, by the way). What it feels like to have a friendship end unexpectedly, or the sheer boredom of depression. Those feelings go on the page, and sometimes they’re illegible, but that’s okay, because the point was to express them, not to read them.

I do try to keep it neat enough that I can reread, but that’s never been the point for me. I started keeping a diary when I was in sixth grade because I thought it was cool, but then I kept having thoughts and feelings and I had no one to express them to. Being a teenager is really difficult; being a bipolar, autistic, bisexual teenager (and having no clue I was any of those things) is even harder. My own psyche was my own worst enemy and my oldest friend. Actually putting things to words – even when it was something like “I. Hate. My. Computer.” (4th of August 2012) – helped me sort out my feelings.

old diary, circa 2012

the inside of said diary

What was important to me? What wasn’t? Today was a good day, yesterday was a bad one, I think I’m going to go to my friend’s house tomorrow, I have a project due and it’s stressing me out. I never have to look at it again. I don’t have to show it to anyone. But someone ought to know what I’m feeling, and since I’m the most qualified person for the job, I better find somewhere to express it.

A diary is a conversation with yourself. It forces you to confront your life head on.

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A little private confession: I was recently confronted with someone I thought I’d never see again, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I was forced to sit down with him. Talk to him. Chuckle at his jokes. While every bone in my body was screaming at me to run away.

But the thing is – nobody at that table knew (or knows) why I was experiencing such a strong case of fight or flight except him. I don’t have any friends who know the full scale of the story, if they know anything at all, who were close to me when it happened.

The only person who knows the full story and would be sympathetic for me is me.

So for the first time in years, I wrote about him. I took out my diary and wrote the entire story, from beginning to end. The important stuff; how it was, how it ended, what I remember, what I don’t. What I know for sure and what I suspect was the case. Things I doubt myself over and things I couldn’t face at the time. And then the evening this happened, every bit that I can remember, what led me there, what couldn’t prevented this from happening, what I should’ve told him and what I actually said. While writing, I sobbed, until I had no tears left.

It took me over an hour to write five and a half pages, because I couldn’t make myself finish. I had to force myself to keep writing, to get past the finish line.

But I think doing it helped me forgive myself a little.

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I think that, for me, a vital part of keeping a diary is actually writing it down. I’m not one to preach for the physical over the digital; I use OneNote in school, and I own a Kindle which I use regularly, and I write all my reminders down in my phone. I even have a file on Google Drive titled “diary, sorta” for when I don’t have a diary handy but I have something I want to write down immediately, like an idea for a poem or a specific emotion to express.

But the act of actually writing the diary is part of the catharsis, for me. The graphite on my hand that I have to wash off when I’m done, my handwriting becoming illegible because I was so frantic to get this thought out before the next one slips out of reach, random drawings – most of them awful – and sketches of ideas. I like searching for the perfect notebook – not too big, not too small, with enough pages and with a nice, pleasing design – and then finding it.

Writing can be done in a myriad of ways, and God knows I’ve explored many of them. I’ve tapped on phone and tablet screens, I’ve typed on keyboards, I’ve written with ink and with crayons and with charcoal. But the simple pencil holds my heart. Maybe it’s the fact that it can be dark or light depending on the amount of force you apply, or the fact that it can be erased – but only very carefully, or maybe it’s the nostalgia of being given your first pencil in first grade and shown how to spell your name (although I’ll admit I have almost no memories of first grade, and certainly not that one) – but in the end, when I put pencil to paper, I express myself in a different way than I do when using any other medium. It feels more permanent, but also flexible.

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Even having been writing diaries for so long, I seldom finish one notebook or another. It has happened, but with the scarcity of my writing, a single diary can often span a year or even much more. By the time I’m reaching the two third mark of a certain notebook, I’m itching for another one. And I’ve probably already bought it; now I’m just waiting for an excuse to stop and move on to the next one. And so I find one. I’ve already mentioned graduation, but there’s also been ones that ended on my birthday, or that I stapled so many random pieces of paper (birthday cards and doodles and poems and newspaper clippings) to various pages through the diary that it didn’t close anymore.

I think I’m reaching that point in my life again. I’ve bought a notebook; it’s got a gorgeous blue cover with an intricate design that says “I need my space” and has a mug with swirling stars in it. It’s dotted paper, which is tantalizingly difficult to find in this country. It’s marketed as a bullet journal, but there’s nothing preventing me from using it as a regular diary, and I fully intend to.

my gorgeous new notebook

I’m in love with this end paper!

I’m looking forward to closing the previous chapter of my life and starting the next one, whether it lasts six months or two years. And I’m looking forward to countless more conversations with myself.

Do you keep a bullet journal or a diary? I’d like to hear your experiences, and whether you prefer one over the other.

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