On Rereading Old Journals

There is a notebook from 2018 that I found at the back of a drawer last month. It is a medium-sized Moleskine, black cover, half filled. The handwriting at the start is careful and deliberate — someone who believed in the ritual of handwriting. By the end of the entries it has loosened into something that looks more like thinking and less like presentation.

I am not sure I entirely recognise the person who wrote it.

The strangeness of self-archaeology

I use the word strangeness deliberately. Not discomfort, not embarrassment — though there is some of that — but something more philosophically unsettling. The past self in those pages held opinions with a confidence I no longer have. He was certain about his tastes, his beliefs about work, his assessment of particular people. He was wrong about several things and right about several others, and there is no reliable way, from the inside, to tell which were which.

What I find most interesting is not the content of those beliefs but the texture of the certainty. Young certainty has a particular quality. It mistakes clarity of feeling for accuracy of judgment. To feel something strongly is, for the young, evidence that you are right about it. The passage of time has been, among other things, an education in the unreliability of feeling as evidence.

What journals are actually for

I think I once believed that journals were for self-knowledge. That they were a technology for understanding yourself. I am less sure of this now.

What journals are actually for, I think, is giving the moment somewhere to go. The act of writing is less archival than it is processual. You write not to record but to conclude — to give the inchoate a shape, to bring the half-thought to its term. The document that results is almost secondary.

"A journal is a place where you can be honest with yourself without consequence."

But of course there is consequence. You — the future self — will read it. And the experience is always the same: tenderness and embarrassment in equal measure. Tenderness for the person who was working so hard at things that would not matter, or would resolve themselves without effort. Embarrassment at the certainties.

What I take from the rereading

I have started treating my journals differently. I think of them less as a record of what I thought and more as a record of what I was attending to. What problems were in the foreground. What questions I could not yet formulate properly.

The thing about questions is that formulating them is most of the work. Most of the entries in that 2018 notebook are, I can see now, circling a question that I would not be able to articulate for another two years. I was doing the preparatory work without knowing what I was preparing for.

I find this, oddly, hopeful. It suggests that something in us is working on things before we know we are working on them. Writing helps that process along. Even the writing you later find embarrassing.

Especially, maybe, that writing.