What's in Your Journal?

What are your secrets?

Hello again!

After a two-month hiatus, I’m delighted to be back. Whatever else I may be doing, writing a Substack anchors my week, opens my eyes, and sharpens my focus. I hope these short pieces on pleasure tickle your fancy when they arrive every Tuesday and that when you read them you feel more alive.

To the new subscribers who came aboard during this quiet time—a big thank you! And welcome to The Pleasure Principle!

I define pleasure broadly and believe it can be found in unexpected places. I have written about

sneezing https://catherinehiller.substack.com/p/ah-choo

and pockets https://catherinehiller.substack.com/p/the-pleasure-of-pockets

and finding money in the sand https://catherinehiller.substack.com/p/the-pleasure-of-virtue

And I’ve discussed 49 other subjects in my year of writing dangerously.

I have not written about journals. A journal (or more than one, as I will relate) has been a constant in my life since the age of 11. Keeping a journal (for some reason I hate the term “journaling”) is a risky yet necessary pleasure. And I keep more than one journal.

The first is the traditional kind of journal: ink on paper, script on faint blue lines. My first journal, received at age 11, looked like a diary and had a tiny lock to contain my wicked secrets (as if!). I soon converted to spiral notebooks, college ruled. I’m fond of the notebooks with bright shiny covers made by Clairefontaine, and now I’m up to Journal 48.

I’m sporadic about writing. Sometimes weeks go by without a single entry—or I might write twice in a day.

What’s in it for me? In a word . . . me! The journal captures who I am, especially during times of high emotion. It helps me understand myself better. Even when I’m in despair, there’s a certain satisfaction in writing about it, getting it out.

I never write for the future, because I almost never reread my old journals. The few times I have opened a notebook from the past, I’ve been dispirited to find I’ve been much the same person, with much the same concerns, for decades. How boring! My handwriting hasn’t changed, nor have my interests and obsessions. For me, the journal’s value is in the present, where it provides an outlet for intensity.  When I can’t tell anybody else, I can still tell IT.

There’s always the danger, or should I say the certainty, of private journals being read by prying eyes, yet people are compelled to keep them anyway. When I was 16, my co-counselor read my journal and learned my true age. Since I was starting college in September, I had lied to get the job, saying I was 18. She was 17, still in high school, so she was a “junior counselor,” making less money for doing exactly what I did.  She was outraged. Of course, I was outraged that she’d casually breeched my privacy. After that, we could never be friends.

Many years later, I accidentally left my journal behind after spending a few days with someone in the country, a woman who made no effort to control her boisterous and demanding child. In my journal, I called the kid “a monster” and described its antics. The woman mailed back the journal, and while she never admitted to reading it, she was always cold to me after that.

There’s this paradox. Even knowing that at some point (perhaps only after your death) your journal will probably be read by another, you confide in it brazenly, believing that using initials instead of first names will mask who you’re writing about. It will not. If you have a secret, you will tell it here, because this is one reason you have a journal in the first place. It’s such a relief to unburden yourself!  Yet if you write about your secret, it will probably be revealed. Just ask Humbert Humbert, whose fevered accounts of Lolita so unhinge her mother that she blunders out into oncoming traffic and is killed, an important plot point.

A journal is crucial to Graham Greene’s thrilling novel, The End of the Affair. In it, the detective seeks the woman’s journal, saying that in his experience, people always confide their secrets to their journals: they just can’t help it. He procures the journal and gives it to the narrator, who sees that she has always loved him: that is her secret. He goes running back to her, but being a Graham Greene novel, it is by then too late.

Of course, my journal travels with me wherever I go, just in case I need to record an observation or an insight (usually about myself) that would otherwise be lost to posterity. Because my journal accompanies me, it contains my Trip Journal, on the last pages of the notebook. When I’m on a trip, I summarize each day in a couple of lines: sentence fragments about where we stayed, what we did, who we met, perhaps what we ate. Looking at these brief notes, even years later, helps me reconstitute the trip—and recommend hotels.

My Trip Journals (Hello Switzerland! Hello Oaxaca!), and their brevity, inspired the LifeLog. A couple of years ago, I became obsessed with the idea that my days were slipping away, dissolving into the river of time, so I decided to record one or two things from each day to distinguish it from all others. LifeLog got its own physical notebook, smaller than the main journal, and every night in a couple of lines I’d jot down anything of note that had happened that day. I thought of this as Time in a Bottle: as Jim Croce sings, “I’d save every day like a treasure.”

To see how LifeLog worked out, you can look at the piece I wrote about it in NextTribe:

https://nexttribe.com/how-to-keep-a-journal-to-improve-short-term-memory/

The fourth kind of journal I keep is a project journal, which I maintain for each long venture, such as a novel. This is strictly electronic. It’s usually just a few pages in which I record my plans and feelings about the project from one day to the other, from gloom to joy.

Naturally, I have a Substack journal. The last entry, from yesterday, reads, “Write about journals.”

*

Has your private journal ever been read by somebody else?