From browndailyherald.com
By Nahye Lee
I’ve bought a journal every year since 2018. It’s been seven years, though it doesn’t feel too long ago that I was a middle schooler gripping a ballpoint and carving letters into paper for no apparent reason. I struggle to remember exactly what drove me to my first notebook, what motivated me to write about my day, how I even knew what a diary could do in the first place.
In retrospect, it might have been Instagram/YouTube/Pinterest—pick your poison. Sunny, smiling seventh-grade me, dipping her toes in the world of intellectual internet personas, would have seen an artfully decorated notebook, neatly printed handwriting, and pretty stickers and immediately decided that keeping a diary would have to be her new personality trait. I know I nodded to myself as I picked out an airport souvenir and wrote my name very carefully on the back cover. I had a journal, and all eight letters of my name were on it. This had to mean something, so I spent the next few hours looking up YouTube videos of journal setups: smiling girls printing curved letters and penning black swirls on the blank page.
It was important for me to write as myself. I was 12 and already thinking exclusively about the lives of others. I fancied myself an astute observer peering into windows, listening in on—and miraculously comprehending—adult dinner-table conversations. I was a quiet child, a girl with her mouth constantly shut, a girl who did not really bite her tongue but just preferred to listen. I trusted I had valuable things to say, but never believed they were interesting. It was easier to open my eyes, my ears, and simply let myself remember the words flying around me, adding salt and pepper to the story I overheard before putting it to paper. All this to say I thought I was the least important person I knew—and to some extent, this is still true—and it never registered for me that I could write something substantial about someone so inconsequential. And what would I write about? Get up, eat breakfast, go to school? Walk the dog? Do homework? At 12, I wasn’t a good writer but I’d read enough of the middle school classics to know that my life was not the kind of life you wrote about.
I’d first picked up the notebook because I wanted to be the sort of person who kept a diary, not because I’d recognized that it was important for me as a writer to reassemble bits and pieces from my life into a coherent whole. For a while, I leaned wholeheartedly into this new persona I’d devised for myself: stickers on the corners of pages, monthly and weekly spreads where I wrote down every assignment (not many) and every item on my to-do list (also not many) in meticulous, aligned handwriting. If I accidentally formed a letter I didn’t like, I’d rip out the page and start over. It’s only now that I begin to realize that even then I wasn’t really writing for myself. My first journal still had an audience in mind, and my writing became an embellished, washi tape-covered record of the kind of girl I wanted to be.
All this neatness came to an abrupt end in 2020. By then, I had been journaling semi-consistently for two years. It wasn’t a regular activity like the notion of keeping a diary might suggest—I wasn’t writing any more than I was reminding myself of the things that I had to do. It was a glorified to-do list that gave me a sense of self-importance far beyond my 14 years—one that broke down with the rest of the world in March. When it happened, I didn’t neglect my journal. Instead, I threw myself into it as a proof of existence. Proof that the words I spoke might stay instead of dissipating into thin air, burdened by the days I spent alone in the apartment.
I grew so tired of talking to myself that I felt I needed to talk about myself to something else. It was at this point that I split my record-keeping into two: a planner and a journal. I kept my weekly spreads, something that had become so integrated into my life that I simply couldn’t keep track of my schedule without it, and added another notebook that I rather innocuously referred to as the Thought Journal. An accurate label, maybe—I did write down my thoughts, feverishly and often while crying. I remember my pen couldn’t keep up with the accelerated accumulation of my sadness. I would press holes through the flimsy paper, gel pen ripping through the fiber and leaving black ink clustered around the exit wound. Far from the neatly printed words of my first journals, my entries would descend into the written equivalent of primordial screaming, transcribed in capital letters so huge only a few of them could fit on each page. I would journal in lieu of bashing my head against the wall. I was stuck: in the house, in my head, in the fact that I would never be able to write nearly as fast as I hoped.
However, some good did come of my obsessive daily journaling. This was the first time I allowed myself to inhabit my own mind and hear what I had to say. I no longer treated my life as a kind of backdrop, an empty canvas across which the lives of others would be superimposed. Although it was unfortunate that I was only forced to privilege my own experience because I could no longer eavesdrop on that of others, I still learned the importance of not allowing the voices of others to take precedence over mine. In retrospect, I needed that year to write only about myself, to learn to let my words narrate the stories of others, and to understand that a real journal shouldn’t be kept for aesthetic or literary pleasure. There was nothing pretty about the temper tantrums I threw across the page, but the words that verbalized my breakdowns were still mine. That was the most important part.
The worst of my mental claustrophobia passed with the worst of the pandemic. I became a junior in high school, which meant that things were getting serious, and some concessions would have to be made. I could no longer spend hours at my desk narrating my deep depressive state, nor could I create an elaborate layout of monthly and weekly tasks complete with stickers peppered in between the lines. Journaling seemed like the easiest thing I could sacrifice on the altar of college applications. I understood the things it had done for my mental health, but it was also unacceptably time-consuming. A fair trade, I thought. I’ll go back to journaling when I get into college, and for the time being, I’ll allow myself the luxury of a Google Calendar and a paper to-do list.
When I look back on the last two years of my high school career, I remember remarkably little. They blur together into a mess of crying and writing essays and trying to win competitions and hating every word I typed into empty documents. There is a prolonged and effaced period of stress, punctured by what I imagine to be short moments of relief. I don’t know. I wish I could remember.
I blame the erasure of my junior and senior year on my staunch refusal to keep a diary. I thought it was pointless at the time—I thought I had not a single minute to spare for it, and I felt like I was living the same day over and over again anyway—but I see now that it had still been essential for me to write down, at least, one thing about what had made me happy or what had made me want to drop out. That would have differentiated one day from the next, and I would have been freed from the mistaken impression that my life was just one day after another with no end in sight. Most days, I couldn’t even remember what I’d had for lunch at school when my mom asked. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but looking back it seems like a tragedy that now I struggle to recall what were actually the last moments of high school.
Regrettably, I never really returned to the method of journaling in which I wrote out in painstaking detail everything that happened to me and everything I felt about the things that happened. Getting into college didn’t magically bring my atrophied muscle of journaling back to life, and I know now that I was a fool to assume I would be less busy in college. Still, I recognize the meditative beauty in sitting quietly and going over the details of my day, picking out the best and worst parts of it to indent onto paper. At least one line a day. 15 minutes.
Writing a journal is like the act of leaving little paper index flags between the pages of your life. Like underlining particular sentences you love and want to come back to, annotating the words that construct the world you experience. One day you will rifle through and take particular notice of the parts you highlighted. You will remember you loved this part, the way it was written, the things it meant.
Sometimes as I write, I can feel the weight of my life press down on the pen. It leaves an imprint, small dents in the paper that would not have been there otherwise. I exist and I remember, I think. Of course I do.
https://www.browndailyherald.com/post-magazine/article/2025/04/record-lee
