On Journals
By Mya Ward
I still have my first journal. A 2010 Girl Tech Password Journal which I unwrapped one pale Christmas morning. I had begged my parents for the contraption because I wanted to be intricate, with ciphers and contraband and secrets to keep. Fundamentally, however, I was a simple child. I existed in a mundane liminality. Between school, between ballet, between my bedroom. Making friends, making up, making believe.
I had no reason to scrutinize. No interior experience or external conflict to build grievances upon. I was still too small and simple for self-reflection and instead had a sort of self-ambivalence. That good-faith objectivity that only children possess.
I was fickle, strung between various hobbies and activities.Once, a Tae Kwon Doe contender, then, a soccer goalie, next, a stage actress, but writing is what stuck. No matter how far I strayed, my journal reeled me back without a twitch upon the thread. I ask the same question in my adulthood, dozens of notebooks, diaries, journals, and sabbaticals later: why do I always come back? And I find the answer, not in some natural “compulsion” or “obsession” which is as much a part of me now as my naivete was a part of my childhood, but instead, somewhere around the fifty-fifth entry of my very first journal:
February 26th, 2012, Roscoe is dead. Hit by a big red car. He was twitching for a bit when the car backed up and then went all limp. I looked into his eyes and cried.
This was a sleight of hand. It was true that Roscoe the Rottweiler was dead, and it was true that a big red car was at fault, but my placement and my passion were embellished. I had cast myself as the focal point, the leading actress, central to the lament. In reality, I was burrowed in a bay window peering at the carnage with dry eyes.
When recalling the experience in my journal, I felt that crying was what I should have, or rather, what I would have done. In the hollow between my imagination and my memory, it is what I was doing. And when I wrote the story, I did so from that borderline—as I said, liminality was my way of life. Because this story was mine, whether I had lived it or not. It was told only in my journal, dictated only in my voice, and I could be both scholar and subject. I had nothing to scrutinize, but by this same virtue, there was nothing to scrutinize me.
And this was the true gift I unwrapped on Christmas morning. Not merely a journal, but a vehicle of personal variety. This complex is shared across generations of women and girls. So much of what we know about women in art, literature, and history comes from what they wrote about themselves. From Sappho to Lady Murasaki, from Virginia Woolf to Georgia O’Keefe, from Sylvia Plath to Stevie Nicks. As a woman, it is a revolutionary act to write your own story.
We are taught to sieve ourselves, to be one person at a time, ticking off boxes where and when they apply. To be a schoolgirl at the whiteboard and a daughter over the dishes and a bride from the chapel to the grave. And through this carousel of selves, we pare off what does not fit the bill. A self that is too greedy, a self that is too benign, a self that is too credulous, a self that is too cynical.
And our worst self is always the self-pastiche—a gaudy, nauseating muddle of personality and experience. So what of these rejected selves? It may be easier to stifle them, opting to live by strict designation only. Yet, even without threshold, they continue to proliferate. Although fragile, whittled away by age, discipline, or disinterest, our selves are resilient, perpetually reignited, revitalized, and reborn
There are those of us who chase these ephemeral selves like dragonflies, who catalog them like trading cards, who preserve them like artifacts, and who know that they cannot live at all if not for our journals.
As Illinois State University Victorian Literature professor, Cynthia Huff, remarks in her “‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre’: The Diary as a Feminist Practice,” journaling is a kind of sublimation that dissolves the sharp edges of identity to unveil our essence. Huff designates keeping a journal as a sort of feminist repatriation because it, "knows no boundaries; it is precisely the subversiveness of this trying-on and living-through of various modes of experience [...] that feminist critics have celebrated and that diaries have epitomized.
Coinciding with the rise in literacy, journaling became widely popular in the 19th century.However, the practice was especially encouraged among women as it is a clandestine habit that does not intrude professional spheres. “Diaries are often referred to as women’s traditional literature,” Huff goes on, traditional because they were the only form women were allowed to practice.” Keeping a diary was an unobtrusive way for women to express inconvenient emotions whilst also being a palliative for broader creative ambitions. The dismissal of journaling is a consequence of the broader dismissal of women’s work in the literary and artistic canon in general.
In their landmark book, The Madwoman in the Attic, feminist scholars, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, unravel the context around and devices within Victorian women’s literature. They argue that part of what kept women out of publication was a patriarchal entitlement to women's stories. Gilbert and Gubar write, “Since both patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women, before women can even attempt that pen which is so rigorously kept from them they must escape [...] the authority that has imprisoned them and kept them from attempting the pen…” The patriarchy ascribes women archetypes, denying complexity or self-determination. This act is reflected in the art and literature of men and the lack thereof of women. “[I]n the same way an author both generates and imprisons his fictive creatures, he silences them by depriving them of autonomy [...] [H]e stills them, or — embedding them in the marble of his art — kills them.
This indifference toward women’s work persists to this day, leaving its residue on our societal perspective of diaries. The very word “diary” conjures up some teenaged daffodil, pedaling her feet on a pink duvet whilst scribbling something safe and frivolous on pretty petal pages. And when I first tried my hand at journaling, I tried to mold myself to this form. I grasped for an interest to write about—the follies of soccer, the drama of theater, the matched games of tennis. I dressed myself up in a new identity every summer but never walked away with one, I always found myself ten bucks short or two inches too tall. I was morbidly indecisive and didn’t fit anywhere else but on a page.
A journal does not uphold the strict boundaries of the everyday. It is a seismograph of identity. It is Virginia Woolf writing that her diary was, “loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.” It is Joan Didion in “On Keeping a Notebook” revealing that to keep her notebook, she must keep herself in its conceit. “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” It is Anaïs Nin writing in the diaries published during her lifetime, “Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.” It is my own days of girlish contemplation caught between the teeth of aspirations gone wrong.
While a story is always a covenant between the author and the audience, a journal is a dialogue between the past and the present. We journal to memorialize the conceptual self that remains squarely in the present, even as we wade into the past or vault to the future. By keeping a journal, you keep pace with that self-pastiche, keep your mind nimble, and keep your story always of, by, and for yourself.