I am doing a fairly terrible job at chronicling the New Year on paper…as always.  The first diary I received at age 9 or 10 had pink paper and was filled with sporadic entries, mostly remarking on my hatred of piano lessons, how I had a cold or how I disliked two girls in my fourth-grade class for always winning some contest or other.  Towards the end I grew so fatigued with my own existence that the latter half of the book became a draft of an epistolary novel about a woman obsessed with the lavish appearance of her home.  She wanted it featured in a decorating magazine, necessitating her to write numerous harassing letters to the editor, which were responded to in an increasingly curt fashion.  I am not sure why this exercise amused me so, except that even now I am pleased by excessive formality in even the most mundane endeavors.

The next diary I received was a lovely pastel green with fake-gilt edges and a tiny gold lock.  I wrote in it for about a week and abandoned the enterprise.  There were others too, a blank book with a pink-calico cover that I complained to about my summer at Girl Scout Camp where my mother was working.  At some point my mother found and read the book, and although there was nothing terribly bad in it, I felt it was too incriminating to have thoughts written on paper because it prevented you from ever changing your mind or denying it in the first place.  There were no more personal journals after that, despite several false starts as an adult.  I even swore I’d never have a blog but I have been writing in one of some form or another for over six years.

Even so, I am not sure why the process sticks for me online and not on paper.  Perhaps because it is meant to be read; perhaps because it’s nice to think there might be like-minded individuals out there somewhere in the world.  Perhaps because I spend a lot of my days with a mild sense of unease that I seem to be the only person who thinks and worries about the things that seem to crop up in my thoughts.  I am not creating a “document”; in fact this space serves as a slice of memory, served up at will and if I miss a day, I am not confronted by a blank page for a piece of time that will not return, but I simply start anew.

There is a part of me that does wish that I had a fat dog-eared journal for every year since I learned to write stacked in a box somewhere, so I could remember better the old selves I used to be, instead of the tantalizing scraps that have survived a dozen moves and their associated purges.  Sometimes I feel like the concept of the ancient ship where every timber has been replaced over the course of the voyage—is the ship that lands at the harbor at the end still the same vessel that set out?  If it is not, then where precisely did it change from the original?  I suppose that is what journals are for—to see where the swapping of some timbers has made something else entirely.