This essay was revised for a recent class, and so, I repost it here. 4.23.09.
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I have been trying, and failing, to keep a journal for the past twenty-five years. It’s shocking to realize it’s been that long—as Sugar Kane said in Some Like It Hot, “That’s a quarter of a century; makes a girl think”—but a relic I found on a recent trip across the country confirmed it. The day I arrived to visit my parents in the northern suburbs of San Francisco, I went snooping around their attic. It’s a sma
ll space, all exposed wooden beams and unfinished walls, full of boxes and old furniture cast off from my childhood, but also from the apartments I inhabited, in San Francisco proper, after leaving home—eight apartments in nine years, and with each move, a change in style, a shedding of a rug or a glass table, to conform to the tastes of the new me, or of the new me that with each move I suppose I wanted to be. Now that I think about it, perhaps in all that moving lies a clue to my inability to commit to a journal. Words on paper have a permanence that my transient self distrusts. They may be ushers to the far reaches of memory, but they are also betrayals—of choices made, obsessions nursed, naïveté indulged, some of which is good to remember, but so much of which can also be more comforting to forget.
I’m not sure exactly what I was searching for amid the flotsam in my parents’ attic. But then I spotted a particular box—unlabeled, yet conspicuous for the sagging agedness of it. The box hadn’t been opened in years, and when I lifted the lid, it expelled a puff of dust. Inside were old art projects and writing assignments, penmanship tests, mini-essays from my first three grades of elementary school. I found drawings of Garfield the Cat that I’d made for my little brother, who went through a serious Garfield phase: bedsheets, lunchbox, plush toys and pencil cases. What phases had I gone through, in those long-ago cartoon years? A clue lay in this box as well. For beneath the curling papers with their cursive exercises and Crayola flecks, I found my old Hello Kitty diary: tomato red, five inches long, four inches wide and one inch thick, held closed by a copper-colored clasp, the key to which still hung from the book by a string.
I remember choosing the diary from the Sanrio store in Santa Rosa, at the big shopping mall an hour from home, where we used to buy all our school clothes. I wanted it badly—it was shiny, and it was red. I loved red, and I loved that the diary had a key, which in my seven-year-old imagination meant that anything put inside became immediately clandestine, and bigger than it was, and profound. I remember having to beg for it. My mother had looked at the price, then asked, “Will you really use it?” Yes! I said. I would write in it, every day.
So much for that.
In truth, I had no idea what to write. I was seven—any drama in my life was more likely to be processed through tears than through pages of angst-ridden prose. I remember opening my diary and, even then, hearing the voice of doubt in my head: You are seven years old. Your life is peachy. Nothing exciting has happened to you. Who do you think you are?
And yet, I made a valiant effort, filling the first dozen or so pages with neatly printed hot-pink ink. I seem to have favored the Pillow Book method, making a list of “my favorite people,” for instance, then expounding on their greatness in short bursts of prose. My social circle was rather small: “Dear Diary,” I wrote, “my favorite woman is my mama”; “my favorite man is my papa”; “my favorite brother”—that is, my only brother—“is Jason”; “my favorite boy is ...”—but even in this spare list are found clues to the person I was to become. I liked my papa, I wrote, because “he brings us surprises, and sometimes those surprises are cookies!” I liked my brother because we “played stuffed animals.” I liked the boy because I was a boy-crazy little girl. And today? I still use exclamation points when talking about cookies, I have loved my share of boys, I travel with a stuffed monkey tucked into my carry-on bag. My favorite color is still red.
The Hello Kitty journal was kept diligently for two weeks.
In the years since, I have bought with hard-earned money, and then barely used, an embarrassing number of attractive notebooks, thinking they would inspire me to write. I started a blog nine years ago, hoping the pressure of an audience would do the same. I even blogged about acquiring a notebook, my first Moleskine, and about the novelty of writing longhand after so many years spent tapping out words by key. That was in 2004: “I’ve rediscovered the satisfaction of putting pen—pen that leaves my fingers achy and inky—to paper. I’m making a concerted effort to write legibly. ... This keyboard stuff has been death for my penmanship.”
I filled one small Moleskine with words and pictures over the course of just a few months. But my journal-keeping, on paper and online, has lapsed again. Part of the problem is that life has gotten busier—although one might argue that this is exactly when one should begin journaling (the fuller life gets, the more there is to forget). Part of it is a lack of discipline. Part of it, no doubt, goes back to that fear of the betrayal of print. Or maybe I simply possess some kind of anti-journaling gene, evident when I was seven and persistent to this day.
I left the Hello Kitty journal in the box in my parents’ attic, but I’m thinking that the next time I’m home, I ought to retrieve it and bring it back to New York. I could use it to replace my Moleskine. Or perhaps it will become a talisman—something to keep on my desk, to remind me of childhood, and lost time, and all the empty pages still to be filled.
