How perception shapes our reality and the importance of keeping a journal

Archival Memories, Joan Didion and note-taking

Life, to me, rarely seems tangible anymore. The archives of my life and its memories are all digital, stored in the cloud somewhere in a cyber-physical world. I sometimes wish I could press a rewind button and watch my life pass before me like an old VHS tape. Relive certain moments, certain memories that I perhaps now have distorted their details or forgotten all about their existence, or even my own existence and context within that same memory.

Stored away in a physical 10 L black container box in my mother’s house in Mexico, tucked under many childhood mementos, is my very first diary — complete with lock and key and all. My mother’s best friend gifted it to me either for a birthday or Christmas. I don’t remember those details. I was probably around seven or eight years old, and re-reading it now, the spelling was graciously incorrect for most words. But therein lie my first inscriptions of my day-to-day life: my thoughts and feelings as a child — what I was doing at school, the friends I was seeing, the things that, as a kid, I found significant enough to write down in a diary and archive forever. The year 2003 mark the upper corners of the pages.

Ever since, I have always kept some sort of journal or notebook of one kind or another. I wrote down the best — and mainly the worst — things I experienced during my teenage years, my existential crisis in my early and mid-twenties, and all the confusing feelings that came with it.

I never gave the act of keeping a journal any profound thought before. It was and has always been a part of my life since that very first gifted pink spiral notebook years and years ago—until I stumbled upon the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion. Within her essay, she unfolds the personal inscriptions within her very own notebooks, trying to decipher what they meant and why she had written them down in the first place. With each entry she takes herself back into a moment, a past version of herself that once thought it significant to write down whatever the context of the moment in time was — a conversation overheard, a recipe for Sauerkraut, a dinner party, etc.

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

Didion didn’t keep a notebook for the sake of keeping a factual record of her life. As she reminisces about past writings, she tries to grasp and find meaning in why she specifically wrote things down about people, times, and places she barely remembers now. “How it felt to me,” she writes, “that is getting closer to the truth about keeping a notebook.”

She continues to explain that, very different from keeping a diary in which one inscribes the day-to-day mundane details of life — an act she found boring — her notebook entries, on the other hand, would become slowly distorted perceptions of events. She writes:

In fact I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry; instead I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all.” Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

This excerpt from her essay made me think about perception and how it shapes our reality, because I too sometimes go back to read old journal entries, and with each passing year that I do so, the memory seems to come alive in a different way depending on the Ana that reads it back. “Did I really write this?” I think to myself about an entry that is either extremely cringeworthy or too well written and poetic to think I could have ever come up with it. And with each passing version of myself that rereads an old entry, a new piece of memory unlocks — a detail I hadn’t remembered at all or can’t tell whether that new detail is truth or fabrication.

Nevertheless, the fabric of my life is woven within those journal entries: the good, the bad, and the cringe. As I grow older and (humbly) wiser, my perception of those times and past lives I jotted down — the intrusive thoughts and feelings of angst — creates a different picture within my head. My reality shifts into thinking, “how silly of me to cry over someone,” when in that moment I felt my life falling apart. Or perhaps I had overreacted or underreacted to a person’s actions toward me, or vice versa.

The ways in which I perceive the reality that was my past, my present, and my future are a culmination of experiences that have been so notable I wrote them down as an archival piece in the museum that is my soul. Blended with the experiences I am currently living and the ones I hope to one day live, my perception of life — and the biases and subjectivity that come with it — glistens like a kaleidoscope. Each turn of the reflective glass mirror reveals a different point of view of what my life was, is, and one day will be.

The art of archival writing in the form of journaling and note-taking — juxtaposed with our digital age, where our physical transformations are recorded and archived on social media and our phones overflow with photos — means that keeping notes is the only way to photocopy our internal state at a particular moment in our lives. It is a ritual that sets our other selves apart from each other with every filled page, with every thought written down, every strange observation we then find hard to understand the context behind or why we found it interesting. Keeping a notebook, like Didion writes, is “a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”

Unlike the photos we splatter across the digital social world, your thoughts and mine will always be the truest form of a record of who we once were and a prediction of who we will become.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. - Joan Didion

Extra reading & watching

Read the Full Essay here - On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion