2/14/02

The topic of livejournals came up on a mailing list I'm on, and the conversation evolved into talking about journals in general. I wrote a post that someone close to me commented he really liked, and I thought, hey, it's about time I added to my web page, so I figured I'd throw it up there.

While preparing to put this post up on my page, I went looking for the web page of the folks who made the journals I liked (Crane Creek Graphics) -- they don't have one (rats), but I found a few folks who sell their stuff, and it makes me wistful to journal again. But enough of that; here's the post:

When I'm journaling, I like to journal with a pen and paper. My mom has a friend who does artwork that goes on calendars and journals (among other things) that I just loved for journals. And I usually did entries in different colors, so my old journals are quite colorful :)

I stopped keeping a journal for a number of reasons. First, a (relatively close) friend read my journal without asking me about it first. I'm typically of the "I'll share, but you've gotta ask" mentality, both with journals and in general life conversations, so this bugged me, not only because it was an invasion of privacy, but because he COULD have asked and I would have happily shared it with him! This incident threw me into a couple of months of angsting about my journal and privacy (am I taunting people by keeping a journal? am I asking for people to pry, secretly? what's my motivation for keeping a journal?) (hey, I was in college -- I was allowed to be melodramatically angsty).

After several months, I decided I'd give it a break and see how it went. After about a week, I noticed something about Life Without Journal: it was different! Not only was I not writing in my journal every night, but I wasn't noticing things during the day to write in my journal that night. And I wasn't thinking about how I would describe an encounter with friends in the journal, or thinking about how it would seem to me ten years down the road to REread about that episode... by not journaling, I was living more in the present.

I miss journaling, and I sometimes think about picking it up again, but I seem to have fallen out of the habit, and I guess, all in all, that's okay :)