My journals are a compendium of my misery. I said this to my friend Nancy one night, and she was inspired to write a song. I said, “I’m glad my suffering is a source for your creative impulse.” If anyone were to read my journals, they’d find me depressive, obsessive, pessimistic, narcissistic, self-pitying, and dull. When I’m happy, I rarely write in my journals, hence their one-sidedness. When I’m happy, sometimes I reread my journals to visit my misery, and I like to do that because it helps me appreciate my fleeting happiness even more. It’s also true that when I am sad and compelled to record my despair, I reread my laments recorded on previous days and find they have an unnerving similarity. This visitation to my past is instructive—my own hand warning me about ruts in my thinking and unhealthy patterns in my life—but it is also oddly comforting. Misery loves company, even its own. My misery loves my misery.
Virginia Woolf reread her journal notes:
“I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity,” she writes in her diary, which has a weird insular quality, a conversation with one’s self, one’s past. “I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better.”
Whichever self. I find it hopeful that she imagined a future self, or several possible selves, to whom she was writing. Imagining a future self is imagining a future.
I’ve written in a diary or journal since my childhood days, although I don’t have most of these volumes anymore. My diary from 1970 was yellow with a bird on the cover and had faint, blue-lined pages. There were few entries, although I bothered to pencil in “Nothing Interesting” for days on end, so often that I eventually took to jotting simply “N.I.” on each page. But one summer day the year I turned ten, I went raspberry picking down by the train tracks at the end of our dead-end street, and was so excited by the size of one berry that I drew a replica of it in my journal. Even now I remember exaggerating the size as I sketched the fruit. (I must have eaten the berry, so had no model for my illustration.) I was so excited by this luscious berry, like a found treasure, that I was compelled to record it for posterity. Even now, nearly forty years later, it makes me happy to read about this raspberry; I delight now in my delight then, as in the famous line by the prolific diarist Anaïs Nin—“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in reflection.”
When I was twenty-eight, my mother sold the house in which I grew up and had left a decade earlier. Before she closed the deal, she presented me with a box of artifacts from my life—some college textbooks, photo albums, and a small red diary with a gold lock. I hadn’t known the diary existed. I did not remember keeping the diary in 1975 when I was fifteen. Although I could imagine myself lying on my bed with the lime green bedspread with my door locked, hunched over the tiny diary, I could not remember a single moment doing this. The truth is that I don’t remember much from those few years between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, when I strayed from my straight and narrow path as the captain of the cheerleading squad and the basketball team, to a more crooked trail—drug addiction and juvenile delinquency.
The diary began at the end of ninth grade, at the start of this sad transition, my fall from grace (the first, I suppose). At twenty-eight, when my mother gave me the diary, I couldn’t wait to get a chunk of time to crawl into my past, reenter 1975, and see who I was in that inchoate stage. I was nervous and excited, understanding that a year of my life that had been lost might be returned to me, and that I might discover something about myself then, that would help me know myself better now.
My first reaction was one of disappointment, even embarrassment. For weeks, every page was consumed by the activities of Dennis Tetreault and whether or not I saw him in the halls of West Junior High. Surely if I bothered to write, surely if I tarried with pen and paper, I would have more to say than, “I love Dennis and I hate Beth. I know she is after him. Lisa Higgins is a flirt and an asshole.” I eventually forgave myself for a lack of gravitas in adolescence, but what made me weep after I finished reading this diary was the senseless and wasteful self-destruction that marked my sophomore year, when it was clear that I didn’t know or love myself at all.
Here is an excerpt.
Saturday, December 20, 1975
Walked downtown and saw Boomer, Mike Guisti and Bob Taylor. They drove us on a couple dust runs. I got pretty dusted. Went up to Guisti’s house after. Lisa puked her guts out. Bob Taylor turned me on to some fantastic hits. Got very blown and had to go home. Good thing Ma wasn’t up when I got in. Everything I saw was double. Wish I didn’t have to come home at all.
“Dusted” refers to the altered state after one smokes angel dust (PCP), which I did every day for about a year. Reading these entries—in my rounded girlish penmanship—was painful. Now thinking about that period is painful. There must have been some happiness, something redemptive, because, after all, I lived, or chose to (I recall thinking back then about not living). Or maybe back then subconsciously I wrote in hopes of a future self.
In my junior year of high school, I graduated from those small bound diaries with their predetermined, equal allotments of space for each day, to spiral-bound notebooks. I wrote during class—flunking geometry, which was an otherwise easy subject made hopelessly boring by Mrs. Drane, and I was often stoned in class. My mother told me she’d thrown those journals away after she’d found them underneath my mattress one day, because she was disgusted by what she’d read. I wish I still had those notebooks so I could know myself better, understand how I turned my life around, quit drugs, made it to college (in spite of thirty-five absences and fourteen tardies that year), and began to recognize myself. Perhaps writing in those journals helped to save me, transferred the story to a place outside myself, my body, where I could look at it plainly and then leave it behind.
Now that I understand how I mostly turn to journals when feeling despair, fear, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and understand how happy moments are largely unrecorded, perhaps I can project backward onto those teenage years some joy that wasn’t noted, that I was then the same sort of diarist I am now: one-sided.
The difference between a journal and a diary can be detected in the etymology. The Latin root of diary is diarium, which means daily allowance. Diaries are more external, I think, recording events of the day, what one did with one’s time in the sixteen or so hours of wakefulness, our daily allowance of life. Diaries record events, like Samuel Pepys’s volumes, written over the course of nine years. They recount everyday life—the minor events (a night at an auction), and the major events (the great fire of London and the plague). A diary is a daily accounting, a listing of items, such as Thoreau’s estimates of the cost of food for eight months, like molasses ($1.73) and rice ($1.73 ½). Or the size of a raspberry. Or a list of drugs consumed.
The Latin word for journal, diurnus, shares the same root, but with an important distinction; it means “of the day, journey.” A journal takes you places, like a captain’s log, even if those places are inside yourself, in the manner of the journals of John Cheever, Sylvia Plath, and May Sarton. Journals lend themselves to brooding, to complaining, to confessions of fear and desire. Diaries are a feminine form, journals seem masculine, but perhaps this is simply because the tangible objects, in my mind, dictate this—diaries with flowery or fabric covers, small locks, pocket-sized; journals seem sturdier, leather-bound perhaps, or like notebooks a scientist might use, like Darwin’s cumbersomely named Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, RA. An excerpt from Darwin’s journal reads, “I was, on the whole, disappointed with this ascent [of the Sierra de la Ventana in Argentina]. Even the view was insignificant;—a plain like the sea, but without its beautiful colour and defined outline.”
The journal I kept while traveling for two months around Europe in 1984 was transitional, a hybrid of my girlish diary entries and introspective moments similar to my later journals. The pages were filled with places I traveled and lists of foods I’d eaten, like the conch stew in Oostende, Holland, in which a plug of pale smooth, muscular meat—the conch—floated in a nearly clear broth, and when I brought the spoon to my mouth, a clear, sticky strand not unlike the slime trail of a slug dangled disgustingly. I remember writing in the journal religiously at night before I went to bed, like brushing my teeth, sitting on a lumpy mattress in some youth hostel or cheap sixth-floor walk-up hotel in Paris or Amsterdam. I traveled with my sister, Susan, and my friend, Kathy, for the first three weeks of the trip, before I went off alone, and I recall they mocked my earnest dutiful task of recording our trip. So, in return, I mocked them and myself. “Dear Monique,” I would say aloud when I opened the blank page, a French nom de plume I’d adopted for the journal: Sue acted like a big jerk today, I’d pretend to jot. I purposely excluded them from this conversation with myself, as if they’d be jealous.
My journals followed me to Michigan, where in 1984 I moved with my boyfriend, Steve. The notes are inconsistent until 1987 when I wrote nightly in epistolary form. “Dear Steve,” I scrawled in pencil in a lined notebook, “I miss you so much. I can’t believe you are gone. I love you.” Night after night, letters to my dead lover, dead at thirty-one from cancer. I reread this journal only once. I cannot imagine reading it ever again. When I look at the cover, I know what’s inside and I don’t want to visit that raw longing again. Unlike my connection to my other journals, I do not feel any affection for that particular misery.
In 1995, I wrote obediently in a journal when I lived alone in a small cottage on Cape Cod during the off-season. It was the first time in my life, at age thirty-five, that I had lived alone. I quit my job as a fundraiser for an environmental group to follow my dream of writing, which had truly been a “dream” since childhood, duly noted in my high school yearbook as my “life goal.” Why it took me so long to get started is another story altogether, but my midlife departure from a career I had established was an attempt to convert the dream, finally, into a reality. The nine months living alone without a job or a community or family or friends nearby were a test—could I withstand what I imagined to be the great solitude of a writer’s life? And a second test—could I write? Could I sustain an idea through to a realized work?
The journal was more of a log, so regular was my attending to it. Like Darwin’s observations of finches, my journal was almost scientific, or at least anthropological; I studied myself like a creature. In the spirit of May Sarton’s quietly affecting Journal of Solitude, I wanted to record my experience of isolation, observing myself like a laboratory monkey. (Such creatures, when deprived of love and company, turn neurotic and selfdestructive, chewing away at their own flesh. I admit that in my aloneness, I engaged in neurotic behaviors—scratching my scalp distractedly while watching television until, to my horror, I drew blood—though far less extreme than the rhesus monkeys). Seven years later, from these daily journal entries, I began to write of that experience. In fashioning an essay called “Miss Somebody,” I imported verbatim text from the journal into the body of the piece.
In 2008, more than a decade after that experience, the essay was published in a journal called Passages North. Recently, my colleague Anthony assigned his students to read “Miss Somebody,” and then invited me to speak with them. They asked me smart questions about writing the essay, such as where the material came from, and how I remembered details. I told them I had recorded that year in a journal, then said something like, “Most of what I wrote in my journal was dross. I selected the best bits for the essay.” I told them that Thoreau wrote seven drafts of his journal, Walden, and that editing your journal entries is an acceptable practice in creative nonfiction. The students had been required to keep a journal, to use the journal to respond to various prompts, and record their thoughts and observations. I asked them if the journal entries had provided good fodder for their essays. Several students nodded vigorously.
Later, I began to think about persona, creating a character on the page that is you. My journal is one sort of persona (Le Misérable), and when I pick and choose among its entries and import them into an essay or memoir, it’s another level of removal from my real self, or perhaps a fragment of my real self. Sometimes I feel that all I am is persona. I personify a teacher (not what I set out to be, but a way to support my writing habit). I personify a writer, like the day I visited my colleague’s class. It seems I’m always trying to answer the same lifelong question—who am I?
Phillip Lopate, in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, wrote that writers must deliver or discover “as much honesty as possible,” and that the writer should strive to “awaken that shiver of recognition—equivalent to the frisson in horror films when the monster looks at himself in the mirror.” My journals contain pure raw angst and anger and desire poured onto the page (so hastily and almost desperately that I often cannot read my own handwriting when I look back). They are, in some ways, more truthful than the memoirs and essays I fashion of this material, or even the stories I tell my family and friends. My journals reflect back to me a monster, of sorts, a Mr. Hyde, the worst of myself. Maybe a better analogy is a reverse Frankenstein’s monster. The creature was, on the outside, hideous and beastly, but the person within was sensitive, intelligent, and articulate. I’m an inside-out Frankenstein, appearing to be a kind, decent, normal, professional, responsible person. Sane. But in my journals the creature comes out—the egoist, the narcissist, the whiner, the critic, the petty one, the stingy one, and the mean one. (The creature was awakened even in my youthful diary where I wrote “I hate Beth” and “Lisa Higgins is a flirt and an asshole.”) I should burn those journals, those notes to myself. But I must be like Shelley, too, the creator of the creator of the monster. We are all these selves, past and future, as Woolf recognized. The self we create on the page is a refraction, an angle, like when someone is taking a photo of me and I tilt my head down slightly to hide a developing pouch under my chin, angle my head just so, and smile without showing yellowing teeth.
If you read my journals, you might think my life a tragedy for all the heartbreak that is recorded on the pages. In Poetics, Aristotle recognized the value in tragedy. He borrowed a medical term, purgation (purge, cleanse, purify—referring to the shedding of katamenia, or menstrual fluid). He applied this term, catharsis, to the audience’s experience after viewing a tragedy. Spectators feel “terror” and “pity” while they watch tragic events unfold, which Aristotle thought both pleasurable and therapeutic. “It is the human soul that is purged of its excessive passions,” he wrote. Once the feelings are released cathartically, it seems, a sort of balance, or even peace, is restored.
The term has evolved over the millennium. Catharsis can be achieved through ritual or reenactment (at its worst, with scapegoats); or in Freudian psychology through talking about underling causes of trauma; or even in dreams, where we enact lust or violence without consequence. I think of catharsis as an expelling or ridding of that which is causing misery or despair. My journals, then, my compendiums of misery, are the catch basins. It is on those pages that the song of complaint, the song of myself, is recorded. Pain and sadness are expurgated, bled from my gut. Once outside of me, once my mind is emptied onto the page, I can then examine what was issued or called forth, and later, often years later, I can make some sense of it. I can use the journal notes as raw material, as in my essay, “Miss Somebody.”
Catharsis, or purging, has a spiritual enactment as well, in which the body is purified so that the soul may ascend into a state of ecstasy. Scholars of Aristotle theorized that catharsis was pleasurable because the audience experienced ekstatis, the root of ecstasy, which means, “trance.” In journaling, raw emotion is extruded into words on the page, which are then lifted and transformed through the imaginative process of creation, then reexperienced, tasted again, but from a distance, in a way that is pleasurable. This transformation—the release, return to, and reshaping of pure-bodied emotions I spill into my journal; this attempt to make meaning; to make art from raw experience—traces the journey from despair to ecstasy. The monster is made human.