July 22nd, 2024
Time for another journal retrospective.
This digital diary is the successor to my longest running physical journal, and that journal is the successor to the journal I buried in someone's backyard to try and "put the past behind me". The now buried journal made clear that writing whenever I wanted to get my feelings down usually lead to me spiralling, even from inconsequential events. Because just the perception that bad things would keep on happening to me was depressing even if they weren't repeated.
So I got experimental. I decided I would only write about my life once every three months. Even though I kept to the experiment since April 2019, it only has about 21 entries, spread out in the hopes of observing changes in life that aren't so obvious in the present. But this also just upset me in the long run. After being abused in 2021-2022 I was only able to reflect on how nothing changed, and it especially stung rereading about things that I thought would change like my living conditions that stayed the same too. "Shitty thing happens, no closure" just sorta hangs over me.
By March of this year I didn't have any motivation to write except for tradition and a sense of obligation. And like, I did put a lot of effort into it. I wrote across 74 pages, my longest physical journal so far. I even categorised each entry, marked by a colour-coded tab to sum up the "times". Red was for growing, which I recall considering it to be interchangeable with orange for challenge (because growing, to me, was more troubles being in my life), blue was clarity, green was hope, and pink was happiness.
In the end, 11 entries are marked challenge, they always follow or follow soon after a time of growing, and the longest time of challenge was one year three months (5 tabs in a row). 5 entries are marked growing. 3 entries are marked clarity. 1 entry is marked happiness. Hope was never used. Hope was never used.
Any entry where I do remark that life changed in three months feels like an outlier, I even felt it back then. And yet I was surprisingly optimistic.
March 31st, 2024, 10:18pm --
Most of my journal entries end with the implication that
I'm on the cusp of something [great].
Maybe the experiment is great for people who aren't traumatised. Maybe the idea that I can heal in isolation just isn't feasible anymore. Maybe my optimism reached a breaking point.
That brings us to the present. Write raw. That's what had been suggested to me. Write raw, write in the moment, and write it into the computer. But what pushed me to publish this diary was to become more comfortable putting something I write online. No grand experiment here. (Oh except I do hope this diary could show me if I'm experiencing brain fog or another cognitive decline.)
I don't think my life is getting worse (in the 2023-2024 window) I just think I'm more aware and also less interested in numbing my emotions.
Maybe one day this diary will prove useful. Maybe one day my last diary will prove useful, even in some small way. Maybe one day recording survival and hopelessness will matter less compared to better things.