I never met a notebook I didn’t like. My bookshelf is crammed with journals with creamy white paper. Some of the books have beautiful covers with vibrant colors; others are simply notebooks, the kind with the spiral binding made of metal wire. On the pages, I scrawl goals, recipes, scraps of ideas that I write down quickly, thinking I’ll come back later and recapture some brilliant idea that I didn’t want to let slip away.
I mostly journal when I’m angry, depressed, or anxious. For me, journaling is the act of spilling emotions out onto the page. After siphoning my troubles out through the ink of the pen, I have space in my heart. The tightness in my chest is eased by journaling. That’s where I find clarity. It’s a system that works for me.
Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron remembers about the way he “compulsively” journaled when his marriage was falling apart. Several years later, he revisited those journals and was struck by the words from a former version of himself. There, in black and white, his emotions were laid bare on the page. Their raw immediacy withstood the test of time, and served as a time capsule for that chapter of his life.
Chilean author Isabel Allende, now 80 years old, often talks of the thousands of letters she exchanged with her mother most of her adult life, until her mother passed away in 2018. “She was 20 years older than me,” said Allende, “so I could always see where my life would be in 20 years.”
I wonder what a stranger might make of my life, if they only had my journals to go on. I admittedly don’t journal much when I’m happy, so the writing in the journals is often the silt I dredge up from the bottom of life’s bucket. It’s heavy, gritty, and sticks to the bottom.
I am a writer, so the footprint I leave behind will be in the form of handwritten journals and missives jotted down in a Google doc.
If my journals are a concentrated portrait of my dark days, the letters I write to my family — mainly my mother and father — are the opposite. I write to them probably once a week, dating back to my first semester at college when I felt homesick. My letters to them have chronicled my marriage, the antics of my four children, people I’ve met, places I’ve gone, and dreams I have. In my letters home, I admit I present a sanitized version of my life: a collage of happy moments, cherry picked and lovingly written on cheerful stationery. I want them to be proud of me, so there is no mention of being short on money, or grappling with difficult decisions. Arguments, temper tantrums, or teens who don’t adhere to curfew don’t appear in those letters. The times I questioned my role as a parent, or wondered if my marriage could weather various bumps and obstacles along the way is not revealed in the curvy script folded into an envelope, affixed with a postage stamp. There are no paragraphs about friendships I’ve lost, or times when I’ve disappointed my friends or family.
In my vanity, I hope that someday, someone wondering about my life might read my letters. I hope they don’t, however, read my journals. But I suppose, to get a fully rounded portrait of my life, one would have to read both. The journals show me at my worst, when hope is dwindling and I am struggling to make sense of the world. The letters are feathery soft butterfly kisses that softly land on beautiful petals of a flower — the petals I choose. They are the image I’m okay with presenting to the outside world. The not-so-pretty parts of me go into the journals.
Even if journals or letters aren’t your thing, we’re all leaving different versions of ourselves behind us like breadcrumbs. The things we put in texts or on Instagram are all snapshots of the life we choose to show. In a world of Snapchat filters and AI, we can easily put out altered or false versions of ourselves. We are all curating our life, our values reflected in all the little choices we make each day. Texts and browsing history, receipts and credit card bills, the type of car we drive and the clothes we wear are all pieces of the mosaic that make up our lives, broken and beautiful.
The person in my journals is not me; neither is the person in my family letters. Or, rather, they’re both me; but they are two halves of the whole truth. The real me lies somewhere in the in-between. Behind me, the trail of breadcrumbs grows: little snippets of stories and conversations that, separately, could portray a filtered or misleading version of myself. But together, they add up to the life I’m writing day by day, crumb by crumb.
