Whatever else Mormonism gave me, it made me an inveterate journaler. The church loves journals, such that more than one LDS president has instructed members to journal from the pulpit. This love is in no small part due to the church origin story centering on records; journals kept by members during westward expansion help shape contemporary adherents’ beliefs about themselves as inheritors of truth as it was being reborn and the United States as it was being carved out. The way the LDS use and talk about journals may not be without ulterior motives, but there’s no denying how interesting it can be to read a record of someone’s life. The continuing popularity of the format for kids’ and adult literature (yes, Jeff Kinney is still writing Wimpy Kid books) attests to this.

Me, I just like to be able to look back now and then and see what I was up to during a given week. I’ve rarely kept handwritten journals after childhood. Instead, I rely on a mammoth, tenuous digital record: the online journal I started in 2001. LiveJournal itself is a middle-era Internet bastion not discussed as often as it deserves, but that’s not the point. The point is that after LJ’s sale to a Russian company that turned it into a weird, dead bot-farm, I moved my archives to Dreamwidth and have been merrily journaling ever since. You should join us! Really!

I try not to read over old entries without a specific reason, something I know I wrote down that I need to refer to, like backfilling my Letterboxd. For the most part, the entries are pretty boring—yet there’s an arc to any life. A journal is a relief map of emotional and physical journeys. Despite my journal’s lengthy existence, there are periods in which each month contains barely one entry, with little detail. There are periods of no private posts (entries no one but the writer can see), and periods of private posts nearly every day for months. There are veiled references and erasures my past self was sure we’d always understand.

Sometimes, I have no idea what she was talking about.

If you have a good tagging system, that can be a key to major moments and themes in and of itself. In my journal (which I started consistently tagging only around 2011 or so), the tag “alcohol” has 2 entries, while “bitching” commands 144. Might be a hint.

Now and then, when life is unduly A Lot, I pick a year and see how I was feeling that day. This past week, of course, the media and the average person have been reminiscing—if that’s the right word—on five years of the COVID19 pandemic. Let’s start there.

A pretty self-ironic exmo opening there! 2020 contained a lot of journaling, because of course I knew that the end of history was happening in real-time, in an undeniable way for once (ha; there is nothing that can’t be denied)… but also because I was falling in love. 3/22/20’s entry concludes, elegiacally: things were more ok than they’d been in a while.

(Fuck Siena for real though)

Well, what about, say… 2011?

Now, I had to refresh my memory of what was going on in 2011 that would’ve prompted such a doomer outlook (other than being in my final semester of grad school and staring down the barrel of job-hunting post-Great Recession). Turns out, quite a lot: between January 1st and March 18, the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi touched off what would come to be called the Arab Spring, leading to multiple heads of state resigning and the beginning of the Libyan civil war; the third-deadliest recorded earthquake in New Zealand history struck Christchurch; and another earthquake in Japan led to tsunamis and the Fukushima meltdown.

So like. Fair. But also… there’s a millenarian strain to this journal entry that reminds me of how much my worldview was shaped by my religious upbringing, although I’d left the church in 2007. Mormons love wars and rumors of war, tbh! When the windows from on high are open and the foundations of the earth do shake? We’re in our element. At the same time, equinoxes and full moons? Girlie was in her big pagan era.

Let’s take it all the way back to 2003.

Obviously, the earliest rungs of my journal are hysterical. Lots of MySpace-era personality quizzes, Star Wars Expanded Universe recaps, and self-loathing. But I’m proud of the kid who had every opportunity and cultural encouragement to revel in the worst excesses of the Bush era, and instead tried to launch a YDSA chapter at school.

Do you journal? If you never have, might you start?