Vulnerability
"The secret is don’t lie to your journal"
-- Dag Aabe, Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past (by Brett Popplewell)
I share a lot of myself online, but I write even more that doesn't make the cut in my journal. I write in it nearly every day; for a year (I think 2022-2023) I made an effort to write daily and I did. Since then it hasn't been as important, but I try to make the time to write something - even a page - when I get the chance. Since I write in so many other places I'm not too hard on myself if I miss a day.
I think about that quote above - "don't lie to your journal". I think I am honest with myself. I can't think of any time I deliberately wrote false information; but I don't think that's what the quote is about. Thinking about it right now, I am sure I've been dishonest by omission. I have probably left out a lot of things on my mind over the years, which does a disservice to myself and any future generation that may want to read my journals1.
Sometimes my journal entries are about as revealing as a regular blog post, and despite the wording differences in writing to myself vs. writing to an audience, some of my entries do in fact read like a blog post. That disappoints me. I'm not making a conscious choice to do that...I guess it's just my "natural" writing voice coming through. But that also means that - like I said - I'm leaving out a lot of information.
Why do I hold back? Is there something wrong with pouring out my soul? I am a very closed person in general and don't talk a lot about myself with other people. At work, I rarely reveal much about my personal life. Only now am I getting more comfortable with that. It's just not who I am to regale people with my personal exploits.
Is that seeping in to my personal writing? It's like I'm internalizing my behaviour with the outside world and not allowing myself to be vulnerable. I talk about all these things I want to write, but I don't think any one of them really tells people about who I am. Maybe my epilepsy project, but that hasn't even gotten off the ground.
I want to let myself be vulnerable and stop lying to my journal. There are days when I can't think of anything to write; well no more. That's BS - there is always something to write about. The truth is that I can't think of anything I want to write that isn't about my thoughts and feelings. I want to stop treating my journal like a collection of blog posts written to myself.
You know what though? Writing them as private blog posts is fine. But if they're for me - just for me - I need to be more vulnerable.
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I don't mean historians, I mean any future descendants in my family.↩