put it in your diary
I wrote these notes in the cracks of my life, without intention or routine. I lived so externally that they were less created than formed like condensation.
I have over 1600 notes in my Notes App, reaching back to winter 2013. I think of myself as an inconsistent diarist, but this number flies in the face of that.
I think there’s a sense of ritual and secrecy around journals, around diaries, around any kind of personal record keeping, and sometimes I wonder how much this sense shapes my desire to write. When I was eight I wanted a journal with a password-protected lock so badly, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say–what I wanted to hide–once I had it in hand.
Up until recently I never thought of my collection of notes as a journal, let alone something befitting the word “diary” and its emotional punch. Scrolling through them I can revisit a nightmare from 2014, see what I bought at a corner store last summer, remember how I felt in the backseat of a Paris Uber at 2am. I wrote these notes in the cracks of my life, without intention or routine. I lived so externally that they were less created than formed like condensation.
When I moved back home in March, I found that writing felt like wading through mud. Where I used to write notes on the fly I would sit in the dark of my room and feel a shiver of unease with every word. Life was inverted, more internal than external, and for a time there was no more condensation. For a few months, most attempts to document my life, fears, and relationships took place during Zoom calls and lectures, when I’d scribble them in the margins of notebooks.
I don’t know what it says about me that I have the most to say, that I keep the best records, when I live most externally.
Now that I’m in Leeds the notes are piling up again. On Friday, I researched hiking trails and read a TripAdvisor review of Ilkley Moor that told me to “put it in my diary.” In England, “diary” carries both a halo of mystery and a sense of routine. It is, in common use, more of a planner than a place for secrets.
So I took the reviewer’s advice and put Ilkley Moor in my diary. My friend Hannah and I took the train to Ilkley on Saturday, and left the station with a set of esoteric written directions as our guide. We hiked to the Cow and Calf Rocks, and then over open moorland to an ancient stone circle called the Twelve Apostles.
Our directions told us to “investigate the rocks.” Toward the beginning of our walk Hannah pointed out a boulder dotted with decades-old footholds and written names. Next to a stream further up the moor, we found a rock with a small face carved into it.
We were delighted by the persistence and animacy of these names and figures. We’re both in a seminar about materiality this semester, and our professor keeps drawing our attention to art that interacts with us like a living thing, not an image behind glass: reliquaries, woven baskets, holy statues with human hair that pilgrims were encouraged to touch and hold. This syncs up with how I see the world and have discussed it within my Native communities–no real distinction between “living” and “nonliving,” joy at the animacy of it all. This is all to say that I think we too often fetishize rigid forms of preservation, when it comes to objects and when it comes to everyday life.
It doesn’t get me past the need to live and create externally, past the fact that interiority feels impossible in a state of isolation, but maybe seeing a diary as a planner as part of my everyday life will allow me to understand my 1600 notes for what they are: a vast personal record. Writing them is no simple way to fill in cracks. And if it’s condensation, that’s something I can embrace.