I've tried countless times to maintain a journal or diary. A friend of mine has kept a series of journals for years -- I admired his diligence, but when he read a few days' entries and I saw how far back he'd kept a record, I couldn't help but be struck by how... dull it was. I didn't really care to know that he went to the movies that day. It wasn't that interesting that he bought such-and-such DVD that one weekend.
I've tried -- much more successfully -- to keep archive of all my poetry. The internet has made the endeavor infinitely easier, since paper gets lost easily and computers are never reliable enough for those sorts of things for very long. I've also got a handful of blogs here and there from some time periods, but if I were to look back at my life, I wouldn't want to read through those -- I'd look through my poetry. None of the latter is dated, and although I keep my work together chronologically for the most part I couldn't really tell you when it was that I wrote any given piece of writing. I just don't remember when it was.
But I remember how I felt.
I remember my thoughts, I remember stringing letters and words, lines and stanzas together to convey whatever it was I couldn't say in any diary. And despite the capricious nature of my memory, the familiarity of my poetry keeps me in touch with my past in a way no daily blog entries could.
Unfortunately, I do not write poetry all the time. I write when I feel compelled to write and that isn't necessarily all the time. As a result, huge gaps of time remain undocumented, months or years where I hardly write a single word regarding my own personal life. I can find traces of habit or stylistic choices based on my outlook on life at the time, but I'll never have a dozen spiral notebooks in my drawer recording my 16th birthday or my trips to the coast or to the mountains, every movie I see in theatres or watch with my family from Netflix on Saturday nights.
But I think that I'm okay with that.
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