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| What can happen in 600 days? |
I have been, over the years, an indifferent diarist. Although I started my journal more than forty-two years ago, there are huge chunks of time without a single entry. But okay, I mean, what really can happen over a mere 728 days?[1]
Yeah, if I could go back in time,[2] I would convince myself that even if I wrote a few words a day, it would be better than writing nothing. It probably wouldn’t do any good, since the intention of writing every day was always there, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible.
It’d be late and and I’d be in the dark.[3] The ride would be too bumpy to reliably mark things down. I’d forget where I put my journal.[4] I’d go a trip certain that I was going to keep a journal, but then leave my journal at home (which is better than leaving it in a hotel, never to be seen again). It is quick and easy to not get a journal entry written.
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| Hard to search through these |
Over the years, I filled (at least) eighteen notebooks to some degree of completion.[5] That’s it, barring some forgotten volume resurfacing. I have finally transcribed the lot of them, in some cases replacing bad handwriting with bad typing, so I will probably revisit the volumes from time to time, when I look at an old entry and say, “just what the hell did I actually write here?” Now comes the next phase. It’s time to fill in the gaps. I have a plan.
Now, because I have been a less-than-diligent diarist, these are the things I must do:
See what I wrote elsewhere. For those times when I didn’t write a journal entry, sometimes I wrote something about it elsewhere. A zine.[6] An email. A social-media post. Time to check my words. I’ve been delighted to find that some of the gaps in my journal have already been written.
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| Like this one |
See what I shot. There have been plenty of occasions where I didn’t jot anything down on a trip[7] but I did take lots of photos. That’ll jog your memory. If nothing else, they provide a simple guide to what I did that day, akin to a one-line journal entry. “Went to the museum” is better than just a blank.
What can I remember? And in the absence of any documentary evidence, there’s always the chance association. Every once in a while, I’ll remember something and—aware that there is no corresponding journal entry—jot down what I remember. Sure, this is nothing like a contemporaneous entry, but it’s better than nothing. (I also mark these as such, since they are memories.) What you remember today might slip from memory.[8]
You can’t bring back the past. There no do-overs,[9] but there is a chance—even after the fact—to improve on spotty journaling practices.
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That’s the gap between my last entry in 1983 and my first entry in 1985. I mean, yes, that’s almost the entirety of a relationship I had with a boyfriend and included two changes of address, but really. ↩
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There’s this fantasy of avoiding some great personal screw-up, but some of those unpleasant events led me to today, so I’ll settle for the lesser goal of not avoiding them, but at least chronicling them. ↩
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You can’t write in bed in the dark with pen and ink. I’ve tried. ↩
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One journal entry celebrates finding my journal after it went astray at the end of a trip. Had I left it in another country? If I had lost it, I might have now forgotten it existed. ↩
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One early volume is lost, though when I last saw it, I did note that it spanned all of three days before I put it aside, only picking it up again after I had started a new one. I don’t think I’ve seen it since. It could turn up. ↩
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Yeah, I used to do that. ↩
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See above with journals that didn’t make it along for a trip. ↩
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There have been times when I’ve remembered something with great clarity but have not been able to jot it down, only to draw a blank later as those memories had sunk into the background. ↩
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As nice as that might be in some cases. Oh, here are some mistakes I would undo. ↩