Writing: Self-indulgence, or self-preservation?

The idea of anyone reading my journals makes me want to gather up every single volume of my life I’ve scrawled in memo pads, composition books, and hardcover diaries over the years, sprint to the nearest body of water, and toss them all in. Swiftly followed by my phone to avoid anyone accessing the graveyard of half-formed, half-cut thoughts and poems I’ve typed into my notes app, of course.

But that doesn’t stop me from recording each entry as though I am addressing some hypothetical audience. The children I don’t plan on having. The grandchildren I most certainly won’t. Friends and family whose idiosyncrasises I’ve preserved between the pages. The entire world when my memoirs are posthumously published and displayed on the staff picks selections of my favourite bookshops (lol). 

My journals are the first thing I hide when I’m having people over — that’s if I have time, or I remember. Is this narcissistic? Probably. Susan Sontag once wrote in her own journal, “One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people.” When I first came across this quote, it made me feel somewhat less guilty about the voyeuristic nature of poring over Sontag’s private reflections. Reading it again more recently, I found myself questioning my own reasons for keeping a journal. 

I first started documenting my internal monologue as a means of interrogating my thoughts and gaining a better understanding of myself (alright, there was an air of both Emilys Brontë and Dickinson in there — I was a teenage girl, for God’s sake). Journalling is an exercise of self-awareness; an opportunity to privately meditate on and process events. It’s also useful for capturing memories — fleeting joy I might have forgotten otherwise, and other, thornier moments that would only hold me back if I clung to them.

But when it comes to who I am at my core, writing is a muscle. My sport of choice, if you will. At some point, a long time ago, I hung my identity upon it, and now I’m always trying to prove myself. To myself. My parents. My peers. That guy I slept with who asked to read something I’d written and said afterwards, “Thank God you’re good.”

I’ve learned that if you’re going to allow something to define you in such a way, you have to keep showing up. Lifting the weight of your words, and then bringing them to rest on the page. And repeat. I write the problem to uncover the solution, the argument to find the apology, and the bad ideas to make way for the good. I write clumsily, and imperfectly, and often without conviction — sometimes with too much. But the most important thing is that I write. Each journal entry is a micro-tear in my creative muscles — every cringeworthy sentence an ache that signals progress, however insignificant.

And what is a lust for writing if not a hunger for an audience? When I die and my personhood is ultimately reduced to all of the “stuff” I’ve accumulated over the years (that’s capitalism, baby!), there will be no hiding places. Maybe the people that care about me will want to read my rambling musings, or maybe they’d rather not bear witness to that part of me. Either way, the choice will be theirs to make. 

At present, hiding my journals could be argued as a means of self-preservation as opposed to outright narcissism. Cataloguing them, on the other hand? Now, that would be self-indulgent. 

Take this excerpt from a journal entry I wrote last year: “Life feels like one great big irony right now. Here I am, learning to drive — something that should feel like freedom. But I’m living in dad’s basement to make it happen. It’s like I’m moving forwards and backwards at the same time, and not really going anywhere at all.” Hopelessly romantic, classic me. But probably just for my eyes only. 

The nonsensical ramblings I penned about sparkling water during a mid-pandemic shrooms trip in 2020? Definitely not fit for public consumption. But there are some things I might be open to sharing, like this vignette I wrote while waiting to catch a flight home from JFK, already nostalgic for my own existence.

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Friday, July 12th 2024

I wholeheartedly recommend going to a sleepy Ivy League university town in New Jersey, cosplaying as a single mother of two cats and a beagle (a trad widow, if you will) by weekday, and living out your Sex and the City girl dreams in New York by night-slash-weekend. Or at least — a version of them in which Carrie et al. frequent oyster happy hours and $1.50 pizza joints.

I may have been staying a four-hour cycle from Aspen Drive (if you know, you know), and the same distance from Asbury Park — in other words, the origins of the New Jersey culture I’ve cultivated my entire personality around, but I still underscored train journeys with Alabama 3, Bleachers, and The Boss — looking out at that spectacular skyline across the river and mythologising the notion of growing up in the shadow of the city that never sleeps.

You can’t help but embody main character energy in a place that’s been the backdrop to so many iconic pop culture moments. The metropolitan landscape that inspired Frank O’Hara’s lunchtime poetry, the home of the hotel where Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe subsisted on art and each other, a city where *Carrie Bradshaw voice* “I couldn’t help but wonder… was I starring in my very own rom-com?”

I inserted myself into all of my favourite narratives, strolling down avenues O’Hara name-dropped in love letters to his hometown; visiting the first house Patti and Robert lived in together; and embarking on respective pilgrimages to Carrie’s apartment stoop, the Dakota building from Rosemary’s Baby, and the Original Soup Kitchen from the Soup Nazi Seinfeld episode. 

I had a few of my own, “My life’s a movie!” moments too – the owner of a coffee shop catching my eye and queuing “Blowin’ In The Wind” when he clocked I was reading Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One. Following the spiral of the Guggenheim while shyly stealing glances at a guy who eventually asked for my number (thank God he caved, because I never would have). Resigning myself to getting abducted by aliens during a 2am cycle home from the train station in near-black darkness, before realising the “alien” was actually a 10-foot glow-in-the-dark skeleton dressed as Uncle Sam (naturally).

The meet-cute isn’t dead in New York. I accepted compliments without hesitation and had fleeting four-hour romances with people I’ll most likely never see again, cashing in on the novelty of my English accent and Americans’ apparent fascination with how British northerners say “water.” I met a woman from Leeds — of all places — for coffee, and she told me she felt like she’d known me all her life, and struck up conversations with strangers about books and art, their tattoos, and mine. But I also deeply enjoyed my own company, leisurely and unselfconsciously working my way through meals alone, reading my book by the light of the jukebox in packed-out bars, and marvelling at how even just a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have dared spend such a prolonged period of time with myself. 

I watched one of my all-time favourite films on the very holiday its monster threatens to ruin (the 4th July is in fact Jaws day, not Independence Day) in a tiny indie cinema, and the whole audience cheered when Brody said, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”, and again when the geyser of shark guts painted the ocean in the final scenes. I spent the next couple of days furiously Googling “Sharks coney island”, “Shark sightings NY”, and “Great white shark new york.” In retrospect, I probably should have planned my beach trip ahead of the scary shark film. You live and learn! 

Anyway, I’ve almost made it back in one piece — no mysterious markings on my lower back (I need to stop watching The X Files), or shark bites to report.

I’m writing this from the airport in an attempt to stave off the Sunday-evening-esque dread I’m feeling at the prospect of touching down on the runway of reality. It turns out I was born to make salsa from scratch and sip cocktails named after Ernest Hemingway, forced to work (as the ancient proverb goes). I think Springsteen said it better, actually: “Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.”

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There you go. A journal entry disguised as an essay. Or rather, an essay disguised as a journal entry. I’ll never tell. Maybe the real reason I write is to remind myself that I was there, that I felt things deeply, that I lived.