Journaling

I discovered deep introspection in 7th grade when I realized everyone would assume I was taking notes if I simply wrote whatever I felt like in my notebooks in class. I would point to that transformation as the root intentional cause of who I am today.

So I’m grateful for it, but by maybe 25, I had enough journals to require their own shipping box. I still have them. (Maybe ~25% of them don’t contain more than three pages of writing.)

It was around then I realized I had never considered not identifying with the fictional character I was writing in those books.

It still occasionally occurs to me to try to do that kind of writing, but something has utterly changed about it. That mode feels like a severe constriction of my experience. In retrospect, that was its appeal at the time: a refuge. From life. I’m not even 10 years out of it.

I did learn to write from that practice, which is the skill that would end up being the driving force in my work. I guess that’s because I put my 10,000 hours in. What happened is that I eventually turned my focus onto things other than my inner experience. A good change.

Because I had learned to write by writing about things I valued more highly than anything else, my writing followed my values. Eventually it found things of broad value, which enabled a career. I had overvalued a legible inner world. I was hoarding it instead of investing it.

Because the experience of journaling was so present and alive, it never occurred to me that I was filtering out every single thing about my experience I couldn’t translate onto paper via my hand in real time. I thought 0.00001% of my life was 100% of my life.

I stopped at some point, and even though there probably IS no discrete cause, I managed to make myself feel guilty for it for a little while, as though I was neglecting myself. But when I try to do it now, just to see what happens, what comes out is bizarre. Why bother?

I still do plenty of private writing, even about my day to day experience. But writing in the first person, from myself, to myself… Boring!