“That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.” ~ David Sedaris
Whether you break the time down by acknowledging that I am teetering on the upper side of middle-age, or do the math that the two decades of this website have documented about half of my adult life, this website would only document about half of my existence.
In fact, that doesn’t even come close. Had I posted all of my diaries and journals since the Garfield-the-cat one I had in grade school, you still wouldn’t be able to get more than a slight glimpse into my life. Whenever I read biographies or autobiographies, I always find myself wondering about all that isn’t said – and that’s a tell on myself. The vast majority of my life is lived off-line; I come here to regroup and summarize, and to try to make sense of specific parts of it. Then I share that with the world, in as palatable a form as possible while eliciting some silver thread of entertainment. Through that process comes a sort of catharsis, a way of talking abut things not that far removed from therapy, but void of any guidance or challenging questions that therapy so helpfully provides.
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” ~ James M. Barrie
Putting my messiness down in words here has absolutely helped me figure certain things out over the last two decades. Aside from the simple documentation of what went down on any given week, I can look back and see how various events shaped and influenced various moods, and vice versa, then better deal with similar incident in the future. Life is repetitious in many aspects – too often we get bogged down in repeating our own actions and reactions without realizing what we might change or learn from them. Seeing it here, in printed searchable format, I can analyze and become better – and isn’t that the whole point?
But even that’s going further than necessary: most of the time the act of putting it down, regardless of follow-up analysis, is enough, and I’ve been consistently surprised at this when it happens. It just came up when I was reminded of my childhood friend Jeff who ended up committing suicide in high school. That incident, and that lost friend, haunted me for years – far longer than this website has been I existence – and try as I might, I could not shake it. I never revealed that, however. I had written a lot about it, without noting how much it had affected me in the ensuing years. Last year I did just that, and in heaves of relief and regret, I put it all down in this post. Ever since that moment, the ghost has never returned, and I haven’t thought of Jeff in that way for months. Far more happily, when I do think of him, it’s not in a frightening, this-must-be-blocked-immediately-and-forcefully-because-it-hurts-too-much way. Rather when I pass his old house or our elementary school, I find the hurt has for the most part healed – never fully forgotten, but no longer the debilitating force it once was. When I formulated all of that into words, the relief was instant and tangible.
Similar catharsis came when I wrote this letter out to the first man who ever kissed me. Tom had been my first gay experience, and for all of the romantic innocence I exhibited at the time, and all the foolish first-steps of finding my gay footing, it was not the wonderful and fabulous foray into the community of which I might have been secretly dreaming. In fact, it was fraught with doubt and danger, and Tom did nothing to offer guidance or advice – in fact, he clearly and coldly told me he wanted nothing to do with educating anyone, and since he had to find his own way, he thought everyone should. It took me years to forgive myself for not standing up to such a selfish stance in that moment, and then more years to forgive myself for thinking I had to forgive myself. In the end, it was the simple writing of his name in a letter which set that ghost free. I haven’t thought of him since then, until trying to conjure this post in fact, and now it no longer hurts to recollect that time in my life.
That’s the power of a diary when done with care and intent and deliberation. It’s not enough to write the daily machinations of a day – one has to write what one fears and does not yet understand, and in the release of that comes a certain exoneration. It’s a tricky process, however, at least for me. I’ve written about many things over the years and they will continue to haunt and nag at me – only when I hit at the specific issues, and the things I’ve hidden even to myself, does the release and magic happen. Knowing what that is, and what it feels like, is what keeps me doing this.
“In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.”
~ Frank Kafka
“Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you.” ~ Mae West
