20190826.0430

I have not made a secret that I have been trying to keep a journal--a pen-and-paper one--for some time now, having started when I was an undergraduate and moving into more formal and "fancier" volumes since near the end of my baccalaureate. I've not been as good about doing so as I would like to be; there are often gaps of more than a few days between entries, with some spanning months. I am not proud of my lack of performance, as might be imagined.
I have for some time questioned why I maintain the pretense of maintaining the practice. The very word "journal" implies that it ought to be the kind of daily thing it never has been for me, as does the other common word for it: "diary." I might claim to use my journal to work on my pen-hand, but that remains much as it ever has been, attracting censure from those who have occasion to look upon it for long. I might also claim that I use it to work out ideas where I can look at them, the specific physicality of pen on paper helping me do so, but that I write in it as irregularly as I do suggests that I have few ideas--which is not good cause to keep doing it. I might also claim that I do so in the hope that Ms. 8 or another might take interest in who I am more privately than in such webspaces as this.
I remark "more privately" because I know there is always a performative, constructed aspect of how any of us appear to others as soon as we gain any conscious ability to regulate ourselves. More attention accrues to social media sites and blogs like this, to professional personæ than to such venues as putatively private written journals, and there is a prevailing perspective that such journals are somehow "more real" than more ephemeral media. The object has more presumed permanence, certainly. But even in handwritten journals, even in documents that might be thought to be sharply restricted in their circulation and readership, I and others fashion ourselves. How many narrate their lives to center themselves in events, to make themselves the protagonists even when they have been nothing but antagonistic?
I expect a fairly limited readership here, and I expect an even more restricted one for my handwritten journals. The issues of limited number of copies--there is only the one, unless something has happened of which I am unaware--and the poor quality of my pen-hand (though I still cannot seem to get a straight answer about what makes it bad) would keep many from reading it even were there a clamor to look at what I have written. I do not expect that I will have to hide much from such readers as would stumble upon and pore over my pen-scrawled pages or that I will be in position to conceal from them--save through what I do not put into those pages. Given what I do put in them--I am freer there than here, and I comment on a great many things here that some might argue I ought not--it might be thought that I would not elide any topics in my journal. But while it is the case that I address uncomfortable or impolitic issues in the journal, there are a few things I flatly will not put to paper. They are not mine to share, or not mine alone.
Some such secrets may do well to be brought to light, I admit. Others need to stay hidden, and I could wish to forget them as I have forgotten other things it were better I could still recall. There are times the burden of remembering as I do vexes me greatly. I do not know what it is that lets me forget things, that seals away sensory impressions I know I have had--the touch of a hand, the sound of a laughing voice--yet leaves others ever-present just behind my eyes, others that seek to entice me down a spiral path to dark places I already visit far more often than is good for anyone.
I will not rehearse those memories here. I will not put them where they may be found. But I have to acknowledge that having them and withholding them, here or in the personal journals from which they are also absent, marks me as presenting a selective, partial, constructed version of myself in each writing situation, and it would do so even were I not so open about doing so. That I do not comment on a thing does not mean I do not acknowledge its reality. And if I will circumscribe myself even in a venue that presumes openness, then I must wonder why I pretend to it. I could practice my pen-hand otherwise, and I could shift my log of events to this webspace or to another, entirely.