the murky waters

one of the ‘better’ things for you that i’ve struggled with routinely over the last 10 or so years of my life is the practice of journalling. that’s part of the reason i created this blog. to give myself another outlet or mode of journalling. i’ve gone through countless physical journals over my young adult life, thrown away some and kept others. i’m not great at maintaining the habit of doing it regularly either. sometimes i’ll journal every day for months, and then the idea of it just disappears for an equally long period of time. normally, with most of my interests, as touched on in my earlier post, i tend to try to find peace with the fact that some things just end up not being worth my time. but with journalling, those periods of absence frankly scare me.

one of the joys that i find in my journalling is they are an easy way to make time tangible. my thoughts, views, and emotions, all change routinely. some periods of my life are marked by abundant joy and others by noticeable darkness. i don’t think i’m special in that regard. most people have fluctuations. and some prefer to forget certain periods but remember others. there doesn’t seem to be a right or wrong way of selecting how one memorialises time, but as an individual nothing terrifies me more than forgetting. at first glance, it might seem foolish to force myself to hold onto memories of difficult times, but to me that’s one of the miracles of human existence. our lives need not only be unidirectional. and i’m not alone in this fascination with tangible time. some people like photos, others like how social media has given us a dual ability to share images and our thoughts with those closest to us for a seeming infinity. these are all great but for most those memorialisations are mere figures of our desired, filtered approach of showcasing our lives to the world. they’re missing a certain organic taste. something that is undeveloped.

journalling offers me the ability to share the unprocessed thought. the insensitive reaction. the elementary view. it offers a platform, a new social media, devoid of one’s ‘cancellation,’ judgment from peers, or even punishment from parents. i am given the ability to say what i want without any externally (or even internally) modulating factors. now this isn’t to say i personally spend my time journalling saying awful things because i can, that would be missing my point. what i want to draw out is the unique ability for journalling to allow us to, again, memorialise time in a way that is more human than any social media would ever allow. your thoughts, your infinite versions of ‘you’ get to live on in permanent form. the ever-changing ‘you’ gets to become wholly one. all the good, the bad, the silly, and the mean are made tangible. your life is no longer unidirectional, but one of many branches, some healthy and others filled with rot. that is what differentiates this medium from any other. your ‘time’ is there, right in front of you. and it’s just you.

and that is what scares me in my periods of absence. where do my temporal cognitions go when writing is not there to capture them? into an oblivion for most. some stay seeded deep in our subconscious finding both appropriate and inappropriate times to sprout through to our conscious and remind us of there presence (another wonderful miracle of our existence). but it’s those times that i forget that worry me. whole periods of my life zapped; turned into a fine dust that disappears with the heavy gust of time. and maybe that’s how life is supposed to be. maybe we’re wrong for wanting to immortalise ourselves. whose judgment is that to make? but surely, i too must grow comfortable with that part of myself. i will forget. i can’t possibly put everything into writing. and so with time, i too must learn to let certain parts, versions of ‘me’ sink away. but at least the ever-shifting, never truly there, present me will stay afloat. my life vest always stays on.

go write something down, maybe.

Peace, D.