on keeping a journal.

There is a trend on TikTok to begin a journal—urgently, frantically, meticulously. Girls and writers of all kinds have been dumping their “journaling rules” and habits with lists of do’s and don'ts. It seems obvious that these kinds of things are up to the user. This is something you and I know but clearly the internet often lacks what we possess.

I have met girls who tell me they strictly do not journal about boys or lust or love as it centers their world around it. They hate the idea of looking back on a life that is not about them at all but a lame boy. I will never admit to them I have stacks of journals and pages detailing everyone except myself. Additionally, I have pages of lies. My journal is no longer precious to me, and that is just how I like it. Because there is selfhood in truth: including but not limited to the fiction. There is selfhood in the pages of self-judgment, of boys, of evading to speak of oneself. This is the self that the journal is interested in and this is the self that writing has power in.

I began my journal at age 3 before I could write myself. My first journal entry—bought at Legoland—was transcribed by my dad and details my day at Legoland. I will not tell you how to keep a journal but certainly I will tell you what I think about mine.

One night I asked Emily if she truly believed in all of the future dreams we speak of and she told me, yes, with no hesitation, no single doubt in her mind, only pure faith, like the kind they teach children in church. But I did not grow up going to church. I grew up with the acute awareness that everything good must come to an end and everything wrong must, at some point, settle—though I am still unsure of the latter. 

Nevertheless, it is shame and doubt which will always occupy me. So Emily cried for a long time that night and it seemed every word that came out of my mouth was the wrong one. Perhaps this is why I write: my words are tough and overcooked, burnt on one side, and not broiled enough on the other. When coming from my mouth, my words leave me abandoned and passive; the body I live in with brutish control, voracious to speak and to sting, stalking plain truth and direct honesty at all times. My words make my jaw ache and my teeth weary. When I pause for even a moment, I find my words so hard to chew on myself, so instead, I consistently spit them out, slavering over whoever is in front of me. Sometimes I find slivers of my words stuck between my teeth and I turn nauseous by just how bitter and sour I can really be. 

Writing diffuses most of this. On the page, I am patient and thoughtful with my words because I would like to be, not because I inherently am. On the page, I am kind and considerate and thus I am. Perhaps this is a kind of fiction writing I take practice in. If a journal is a nonfiction self-narrative text, that many readers assume it as such, then the Mia who is described and who is the voice of complete narration, must not be trusted with the truth. An unreliable narrator. Instead I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all.”1 In an effort to evade harsh truths and unsolicited honesty, I take refuge in fiction. To spare my audience, yes, but also to inch closer to another kind of truth: a sensation, a feeling, a phenomenology.  

If this truth is followed on the page, surely writing it down actualizes it in some way. In search of validation? Perhaps. In search of recreation? Of selfhood? Most certainly.

On the page, I am active and so I am real, a writer instead of a reader, a writer instead of a woman, a creator instead of a creation. And it is in the journal where this is made most clear. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.2 It is the journal that creates and allows for creation of the self, particularly as woman. The text stands as proof of transcendence. It is the final step toward delivery as it births you into the text; no longer an object in the social world but the subject of the text, the creator and creation, possessing the powers of the divine. It is the pen as an umbilical cord, binding the womb and the child and then reversing that sequence: the child becomes the womb; the creator creates herself. 

And so I write and especially I journal3 and I make pathetic attempts at defining selfhood but mostly, it keeps me real and active, preventing all threats of slippage. Slippage: I am made up entirely of fiction.