My whole life I've had this love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with keeping a journal. I've tried – god knows I've tried – to be one of those girls who keeps a series of pretty notebooks in which she scrawls her deep and meaningful thoughts or blow-by-blow accounts of her daily adventures, usually in pretty script-like handwriting.
Well, after many attempts between the ages of six and 23, I feel I can safely say that that is just not me. As much as I'm terrified of forgetting whole chunks of my life because nobody is writing this shit down, I've also decided it's simply not worth the angst.
This is what happens:
- I buy an overly priced but extremely pretty bound notebook and begin to scribble down my thoughts.
- I reread the page and want to vomit at my own naivete/wishy-washy authorial voice/messy scrawl (okay I've been told I have the neatest hanfwriting anyone's ever seen, but being a perfectionist, nothing is, well, ever perfect).
- I persevere for a few days, weeks or months with sporadic entries and various catch-up lists, trying to ignore my wonky margins and schizophrenic handwriting (it varies depending on my emotional state when writing).
- I give up and either chuck the half-used up notebook into my memory box (something I am good at keeping) or rip out the pages and surrender them to the bin.
- I feel paralysed with fear that one day when I'm 90 I will have forgotten this fight/epiphany/happy weekend because it is not recorded in black and white. (For some reason this seems very important.)
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