Sunday, April 26, 2015

20150426.0837

I noted yesterday that I recently completed a volume in the journals I have been keeping for some ten years, now. I started another one yesterday, as well. In the past, I have told myself at each new beginning that I would be better about keeping up with entries than I had in the previous volume, and I have been disappointed with myself in each volume. I skip days, sometimes for weeks at a time, and a journal that should take me some two months to fill eats more than twice that. The journals I currently use are hardly thick, so the delay in filling them is not something that argues strongly in my favor. This time, however, I have told myself no such thing. After a decade of limited success, I think it is time to recognize that I am not going to be better about the thing than I am and to accept that my level of performance is as it is. It is a lesson I will doubtlessly have cause to learn about other things.

My current journals contrast with those in which I started my formal journaling (not the binder-bound legal-pad pages from before), although I buy them from the same store. They are more elegant, certainly, more refined, but the disjunction annoys me for reasons I believe I have noted. Admittedly, they hold less, and they cost more. But my current journals, unlike the kind I used to use, are at least in part made in the United States, while the cheaper ones I used to favor are imported entirely. And I do appreciate having the nicer volumes in which to write. It seems to me that they will endure longer than the cheaper ones, and the impression they create is more like that to which I aspire (admittedly without so much success as I should like) than the earlier ones. That my shift to them more or less corresponds with my moving from pre-professional to "professional" status reinforces the impression, of which I approve.

It could be the case, though, that some of what I discuss in my December 2014 CCC piece applies, that I look for the particular impression to be created serves as a sort of security blanket for me, helping me to believe in my own abilities rather than reflecting those abilities to others. That my journals are not on pubic display--as the office accoutrements I discuss in the scholarly publication were--reinforces that idea. They are secreted away, kept where only I and a very few others can see them, and although those people are the ones about whose opinions I ought to care most, they are also the people who are already convinced of my excellence and value. They are not the people I need to assert myself to as being who I am and want to be--with one exception whose identity should be obvious at this point. And that one seems to need much, much more convincing.

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