I started writing in a paper journal again. It’s been a while. I’m not sure exactly how long, though I could probably piece it together by taking out all my paper journals and laying them out. That’s something I’ll probably do sometime. But in the meantime I want to just think about the journaling I *have* been doing.
I started doing it again while I was on military reservist back in August – I brought a fresh notebook with me to write in. And then – this bit is kinda funny – there was an evening where I was feeling a lot of soreness in my hips from stretching and working out, to the point where the pain was actually difficult to put out of mind – and so I asked my wife to bring me a bedside table and my iPad, so I could distract myself. And… since I now had a bedside table, I brought my journal too, and started writing in it. And when I woke up the next morning and saw my journal lying open with my handwriting in it, I felt something.
What was the feeling? I felt a sense of… communion. I felt loved, by my past self from the day before. And I felt compelled to keep the game going.
At some level, this is true for everything I do. As I type this out in my wordpress text editor, I can see that the title says “0777” – which means that there were 776 posts like this before it. And that gives me a sense of continuity. A sense of being a part of something greater than myself, a sense of having “built” the “environment” that I “inhabit”. Here’s an older picture of when I was going through my writing – I described it as comforting, like your past self giving you a hug.
But I think what really struck me, while I was journaling… was realizing, while I was doing it, that it was a somewhat rare moment for me – to be writing for myself with absolutely no intended audience other than myself.
I started writing these word vomits partially because I had gotten sick of writing for some particular audience or another. I had gotten sick of always thinking about other people when I was writing, always trying to frame things for other people. I was spending so much time and energy thinking about how other people would respond to my writing, what other people wanted to hear, that I had lost track of what I wanted to hear. What I wanted to read. What I thought, independent of everything else, everybody else.
So I abandoned my main blog (where I had been writing about local news and local politics) and came here, to ramble about whatever I felt like rambling about. And the early vomits were particularly incoherent and rambly, with no particular direction in mind, no goal. I just wanted to get as many words out of my system as I could, and make sense of it later. Well… some time has passed. I started in 2012, it’s been 7 years now. I’m a different person – I’ve been several different people since. And along the way, I’ve developed a bit of a Twitter following – there are 400+ people who follow the @1000wordvomits account. Which is pretty cool.
I had always meant /1000/ to be a project to be completed in public. After all, if I wanted to do it totally privately, I could’ve done it totally privately – either anonymously with no link to my identity, or offline. But I wanted to do it publicly and online. Why? Because… I don’t think anything like this has been done? Not quite like this, anyway. And it’s something that I wish I had seen someone else do, in this particular way. I don’t expect most people to be interested. Even I’m not entirely sure if I’m interested any more, the way I was when I was starting out. I’ve kind of done what I set out to do, as a writer. I know that I’m a writer now.
But so… somewhere along the way, because I had all these goals about being a prolific writer, being public facing, developing a voice, building an audience – somewhere along the line, I started to undervalue Truly Private writing. Because… why write anything that nobody’s ever going to see?
When I ask that question, I can laugh, because it’s obvious now. You can think thoughts in private that are harder to think publicly – and once you have those thoughts, if you subsequently want to share them with others, you can. It can be a simple matter of copy + paste if it’s something you’re writing in your private notes or emails to yourself – and if it’s on pen and paper, well you can rewrite it. I type very fast.
So this whole word vomit is really just a reminder to myself of the value of writing privately, for myself, even as I’m “racing” to be a prolific writer in public. I am my most important reader. I am my most precious audience. And while it’s great to have lots of people to talk to, and learn from, and riff and play with – I’ve said recently that the #1 thing I wish I had done differently was be more intentional about spending time with great people – spending time with myself is a critical part of that.
I mean, it’s all connected, isn’t it? I am one of the people I know. And when people say things like “you are the most important person in your life” – I don’t actually believe in taking that at face value. I don’t know if it was always necessarily true for me. I mean… there are ways in which it’s “foundationally” true, but there are also ways in which… OK, this is a Gordian knot in the making.
I think what I really want to say here is that… I have been experimenting with calibrating my sense of self-worth all my life. I don’t like calling it a “struggle”, because that de-emphasizes the playful curiosity with which I do it. I have experimented with being a megalomaniac (and truly believing it) and I have experimented with being worthless (and truly believing it). “Love tells me I am everything, wisdom tells me I am nothing, and between the two banks flows the river of my life.” Then what? I think after it all, or maybe in between it all, there’s a sort of quiet assessment. I’ve noticed that I think more highly of myself now, but not in the brash, needy way that I did as a teenager – and I believe you can actually see the difference in my face. I’d like to see how far I can take this, and I think journaling is an important part of this.