journal like everyone's watching

"She is the Joan Didion of her house. Her parents don’t know who Joan Didion is."

I am expecting my friends to read through my journal if I leave them alone in my room with it. My current journal is yellow, easy to spot. It looks as if, or maybe it is made that way, a fabric was stretched over its cover.

I suppose everyone would be tempted to read through their friend's journal. I suppose everyone would be tempted to read anyone’s journal if it was left in front of them. A mind wide open. A body pierced through. A story laid out - bare, naked. I read my friend’s journal once, without their knowing, of course. It was great. That’s objectively wrong. But crimes against your friends are not the topic of this essay.

There’s this girl, she is 17 - an angsty teenager. She spends too much time on her phone, she is the eldest daughter (cliche) and she has the nerve to try. She hasn’t watched Girls, but she will and she will say she likes it for the writing. She hates Marnie. She likes books and she read Dostoyevsky just when it hits the most (16), and she thinks no one writes better lyrics than The Smiths (as long as songs by The Smiths exist teenagers will be angsty, I believe). She secretly might be Marnie. This girl wants to try out journaling. She even bought a black notebook, a Muji pen. She is the Joan Didion of her house. Her parents don’t know who Joan Didion is.

She sits down to write in her journal each day. She follows what she found online on journaling. On having a “commonplace book”. She made a Pinterest board.

It is not going to work out.

She will forget about the journal. She will chuck it in somewhere, a dark corner of her room, a silent cupboard in between an old piggy bank and a Spanish textbook from the 5th grade. It didn’t work out because she’s not writing like everyone is watching.

“25 years Ago, Joan Didion Kept a Diary. It’s about to become public” is the headline of The New York Times Article published at the beginning of February. I saw it on Substack, reshared with a note “a girl’s worst nightmare” followed by comments who disagreed and hated on the practice of sharing the contents of one’s diaries posthumously.

It’s not the first time the diaries or journals of a late famous person have fallen onto our bookshelves. There are the journals of Susan Sontag or Franz Kafka. Yet we did grow up with the idea that reading someone’s journal is bad. I remember stuffing mine in the air pipe leading from the fireplace downstairs. On a personal level, we all feel like reading someone's journal is something forbidden.

Things change when the person who wrote the journals is a celebrity or someone we never knew.

Sally MacNamara Ivey has read more than 10,000 unpublished journals. She began collecting them in the 1990s and has since studied diaries as pieces of literature and history. She says that reading them has helped her through times of sorrow, like her husband's death. As usual, she reached for her journals at that time, and she found entries about a man going through a period of grief. The entries were from 1927.

My dad has a diary of an old relative who lived through the Second World War. It is stored somewhere in the house and I hope we get to read it through soon. Reading other people’s journals if they are gone is good, then? Is it still a girl’s worst nightmare?

It’s interesting to see that in times where we allow to share so much of our lives online without often thinking of it, we still see and value journals and diaries as a safe whose only lock belongs to the writer. For a feature in The Atlantic written by Lauren Silverman, she talks with a cultural psychologist, Joshua Conrad Jackson. He mentions that the power of diaries comes from the very thing that keeps us from sharing them with anyone else - its focus on private affairs. In his study, Jackson proved that people who read other people’s journals felt closer to one another and held fewer negative stereotypes about the other group (the study was run on groups of Americans and Pakistanis).

I do believe that if I told my friend whose journal I read that I did it, they wouldn’t be happy. That’s understandable. But I do believe there’s a lesson here, and not the one you’d expect. I am not vouching for not respecting each other’s privacy.

That girl who quit journaling - she didn’t make it because she had no clue how to journal. Journaling became a commodity rather than a genuine activity. It became a badge you want to put on your uniform, something that positions you as an intellectual, a person in tune with their inner something. Journaling became a Pinterest board. People do want to journal. Past the superficial, most of the time there is a genuine interest in doing something for oneself, but what most people don’t begin to think about - they’re busy choosing Moleskine or Muji - is that at some point you just have to write.

I have been journaling on and off for a few years now. I have realized a few things that do and don’t work for me. I need to keep my journal on me at all times, I can’t write in it every day. I use it for everything like making a calendar, writing down my grocery list, I don’t follow any rules with it. Yet, with all this knowledge I do get stuck sometimes. There are weeks where I don’t want to touch it, that’s mostly when I am sad. What I write is the reflection of how I feel, and when you feel sunken, dragging that pen across an empty page feels like ploughing dry soil. It simply sucks.

But this year I stumbled upon diaries of Margaret Gregory, a friend of Yeats. The context does not really matter, but the woman was sad (her husband was a mean, mean man). She was writing through and with her pain. She worked the page.

I started doing the same. And I kept thinking that she wrote in an honest way. She wrote in a way that I could understand everything. So I started doing the same, not only working the page, but writing it as if someone half a decade later would read whatever I was writing.

Nothing has motivated me more to write truthfully. I have done some questionable things, some bad things - to myself or to others - everyone does. And everyone wants to forget, most of the time. You don’t want to think about it, let alone have it down on paper. Yet, writing about it is the way to show yourself you are okay with whatever that has happened. It has taken me weeks to write about some things, but once I did it felt as if a chapter was closed. It felt as if I worked something through.

A non-existent reader (because let’s not kid ourselves I am not famous enough to have my journals published posthumously) helps not even with working through our actions but also with structure. Sometimes I catch myself skipping parts of the story because I know how it went. But the thing about journaling is that we should try to make time to articulate ourselves well. There’s this quote that Pheobe Waller Bridge mentions in 73 questions with Vogue - “We write to taste life twice” and for the most part I love journaling for making me think about my life as a story. I am an observer, a person who catches details, removed (?) probably not, yet I am a recollector of things that happened.

That girl might take up the journal again. If she does, she should try writing like everyone’s watching. She should sit down and have the time not only to keep her letters straight on the lines of the page, but her story straight - for herself and the non-existent reader.

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who wrote this?

Iza Jabłońska is a culture writer from Poland who loves long reviews on Letterboxd and will always vouch for a good Youtube essay. You’ll find her globetrotting with a notebook in hand, and a lot of things to say. Read more on her Substack: 3 Letters or stalk her on Instagram.