On Daily Journal Entries
February 20th, 2024
20 February, 2024. A year to the date since my last blog post.
I was so scared to turn 24 years old. I’m now only several months from being 26 years old. 2014 was 10 years ago. I remember living through that year very vividly.
On July 9th, 2023, I bought a forest green moleskine journal and decided that I would attempt to create at least one entry a day for the following 366 days (leap year) until I turn 26.
Safe to say, I failed in this attempt. I failed before I began as the original goal was to journal every day of 25 and I had already missed the entry on my 25th birthday.
The rules for each entry are simple, however; each submission consists of the date and military time in which the entry is being written. I use the same pen every day, a black Pilot Razor Point Fine Line pen. There are no metrics for the content of my writing itself, though. It could be a doodle, one sentence, one word, one letter. The only objective is that in the 1,440 minutes in a calendar day, I would take at least 2 of them to put pen to paper.
July 8th, July 28th, December 8th (this one hurt), December 19th, December 24th, December 31st, and February 12th are all the days I forgot to write for 25, and I’m sure the count will increase before the year is up.
I’m not sure if I have an obsession with dates necessarily but I find them interesting, as somewhat arbitrary checkpoints that recur indefinitely, but no two instances ever look the same. I’ll never remember what February 20th, 2005 felt like. But I remember a year ago today I was in New Orleans with a dear friend, and that means something more to me today.
I don’t know what I hope to get out of journaling. I imagine the original hope was that it would make me more productive or provide me with the emotional clarity to calculate big decisions I may have to make in the future. I think the idea of incorporating a rigid daily activity has always appealed to me from a creative standpoint, and I’m sure I hoped that using a journal every day would eventually translate into writing songs every day or taking pictures, or drafting story boards.
It hasn’t done any of that.
And I still find myself trying to keep the moleskine in eyesight every day. At 9:45pm every single day, an alarm goes off on my phone just to make sure I give myself the extra reminder before it approaches midnight. I will still sink in defeat when I realize a day has gone past that I forgot to submit an entry. A day I won’t get back.
The day that follows a missed entry usually requires some degree of self-regulation. I allow the critiques first: “Really? You snoozed the alarm and then just wasted the rest of the night when you could have wrote something?” “You had like 5 hours of free time today and couldn’t remember to write one word in this fucking book?”
It can get deep.
What comes next is a practice of home-grown self-compassion: “It’s fine. We keep moving.” “It’s gonna be okay.” “I said I would show myself grace.” That exercise alone has proven to be one of the most valuable things I could have received from failing at this journaling goal. Being unshakably committed to conjuring care for myself, especially in moments when I least feel like it.
There have been many times throughout my young adulthood where I sought to place the validity of myself in the hands of something or someone else. With this method, I’m now only as good as my friendships, my relationships, my ability to create good art, my physical capacity, my fashion sense, the media I consume. While I have gotten quicker at shifting the burden to other sources, there come moments where I have nothing and no one else to pull from except myself alone.
And perhaps when the weight is ony my shoulders, my only metric for growth and validity centers around “Am I better/happier/smarter than I was a day/month/year ago?” “Am I setting myself up to be better/happier/ smarter a day/month/year from now?
Now, time dictates that, not me.
My relationship with times and dates were and still are my only ways to value if my compass is still north-star bound. It’s something that inspires and equally exhausts me.
That being said, in the 227 days since I turned 25, I’m learning I’m still solid. I have been for quite some time.
by Tim Mensa
