On January 1st, my girlfriend messaged me to tell me about how one of her best friends found time during every day of 2023 to record one second of her life and let an app compile them into a yearlong video diary, and told me that she was going to try and do the same for 2024. I thought the idea was cute, which prompted me to download that same app and make the effort to also shoot moments of my every day to go towards an eventual six minute collage of my year. The date as I write this sentence is January 8th and I have recorded exactly two clips for this project. One is a slightly unflattering, blurry whip-around of my friends dancing at a bar on New Year’s Eve (technically it was actually New Year’s Day, but none of us had slept until that point and hey man, I’m not a cop) and another is a boringly static clip of a rain-sodden shark plush toy I saw on the pavement during a walk to Aldi on January 3rd. I forgot to add clips to all other days and God knows I won’t be adding clips to any others either. I think I can remember what the last eight days looked like. I can probably recall a few interesting things I saw on the days I stayed indoors, worked from home and melted on the sofa playing games I barely enjoy until I feel I’ve earned an episode of Malcolm In The Middle. When I decided to join my girlfriend in this project, I knew I would probably soon give up on finding those fun little seconds. I knew I would begin living my life through my peripheral vision, nervous I might miss something exciting or pretty or fun or ironic to shoot for that day. I knew I would do this because I am a very, very easily embarrassed person and I know that nine days out of ten, I am working from home, I am on my sofa, I am playing games I barely like and I am watching Malcolm In The Middle with one eye on Twitter. I cannot stand the idea of anybody witnessing the monotony of most of my days and I hate the idea of beginning to live life as a reality show camera, paranoid of missing that special something that will not only make some of my friends laugh and think of me as a slightly more interesting person than they did a moment prior, but will also not make anybody think I’m weird or boring or lazy. I was thinking these things because, as I always do whenever I attempt any kind of journaling, I become paranoid about what an audience would think of me.

During a trip to London I made with my girlfriend recently, I went with her to a Japanese stationary shop that specialised in very simple, aesthetically pleasing notebooks and desk accessories - if you care at all about trendy stationery, I’m sure you know exactly which shop I’m talking about - and began to browse. Lots of recycled brown paper. A water bottle refill station. Some very nice socks. Then I saw it, something that I have never once desired to own yet felt as if I had been seeking it for my entire life - a pen with yellow ink that still showed up legibly on white paper. My favourite colour is yellow but I had never before dared to imagine that advancements in pengineering would one day enable the splitting of the calligraphic atom and make a yellow pen truly viable as an everyday writing implement, all for just £1.50. It didn’t even take the dishonourable route of leaning too far towards orange to realise it’s ambitions. I knew I had to have it, but was lucid enough to know I didn’t want to purchase a pen which cost more than an Island Delight Lamb Patty from Sainsbury’s that I had little to no practical daily use for. It’s been years since I’ve ever had to hand write anything - even filling in a birthday card these days leaves me feeling like Aron Ralston (had to cut his right hand off with a dull knife) on day 5 (this is the day he had to cut his right hand off with a dull knife) in Bluejohn canyon (this is where he had to cut his right hand off with a dull knife). After browsing a few different notebooks I eventually landed on a small, thick, A6 notebook that proposed itself as a ‘one page, one day’ journal. I was quite surprised that I bought it, as it was about £6.50 as I recall and usually any purchase I make over a fiver these days demands a good few hours of careful deliberation and a lay down before I pull the trigger - but I guess I became lost in the legible yellow pen of it all. Not to mention that in the past, I have never once been able to commit to journaling or diary-keeping in any form. I’m too concerned with the eyeballs out there. Too bothered by how simple or dramatic or inane my writing will look to anyone who would ever read it, and of course there are so very many who want to read my diary. From Primary School, to Sixth Form, to Full Time Job, I have not yet reached that impasse where I was able to shed this irrational insecurity and write for me and me alone. For a long time, I didn’t think the act of journaling was worth much at all, in fact. I believed that my anxiety about writing performatively and changing my thoughts to read sexier and less embarrassing was due to how simply intelligent and self-aware I was, and that everyone else only journaled to seem interesting or mysterious or deep. Those people… so transparent, so aesthetically-minded… so cringe. Not me, no way man. Only the real free thinkers in this world actually understand the universal truth that being embarrassed to do something makes it worthless, and that all who partake in it are attention whores who are actually far more insecure than you.

On the train home that next evening, I decided to try filling out that day’s page on the tiny, shivering fold-down table on the back of the seat in front of me. I consciously decided that no matter what I write, I write it plainly. I would only write about the most salient and pressing thoughts and experiences of the day and I would write it in the way I think it - compelling voice and tone be damned. The process was interesting, and I felt at points that I had to physically wrestle my hand away from pausing to consider how to most eloquently express what I felt when I saw how that small monkey foetus in a jar of pickle brine at the Hunterian Museum looked like it was sad. I was quite surprised at how pleasant an experience I found it. Writing in the diary non-performatively, I mean.

It wasn’t long, however, before I had my newfound enjoyment in jotting down my day’s thoughts and feelings rocked by a slightly sanctimonious post on Twitter of all places, if you can believe it. A Twitter user, who has now since deleted their post, took a photograph of two identical notebooks side-by-side. In fact, they are of the very same brand as the one I am currently using. One had been used to its fullest capacity and was buckling at the seams as its warped paper thickened a notebook that was once only a few centimetres thick, and the other was brand new and thin and shiny. She captioned this photo,

“Something so poetic about using an item to its maximum capacity.”

Another Twitter user quoted this post, saying,

“Essay to be written about the commodification of journaling for journaling’s sake as performed introspection in the digital age.” 

I think when I first saw this tweet on my timeline, I actually gulped like when Tom or Jerry notices a Piano or Anvil about to land on their head or opposite end of a long floorboard that they’re standing on. I had only just managed to convince myself that I was perhaps the only person in the world who cared about being performatively introspective while journaling. Now, granted, I never amended that thought with ‘-and nobody on twitter will ever make fun of that concept’ but you’d think I did by the way my eyes widened when I first saw that tweet. Oh God, they know, a twitter user who’s followed by one of the Chapo guys knows and they’re gonna post about it… 

With a scream, I sit bolt upright in my bed at night with my blanket tight in my shaking fists, aglow in moonlight and drenched in a cold sweat. Seeing that tweet was no nightmare, reader. No, my burgeoning Sleep Apnea had simply almost killed me again, but I was awake now and had performative journaling on the mind- my imagination ablaze with the adrenaline that comes with almost being slain by my soft palate. 

If you’ve ever tried to transcribe a long form conversation, you’re already well aware of how flagrantly spoken language can often completely defy most structural and grammatical conventions without ever being unintelligible. Language is communication, you can’t pronounce sentence splicing and tenses don’t matter if you’re talking fast enough. Thought is an entirely other thing, wholly indefinable and slightly inscrutable in how you can connect dots in a split-second while never mispronouncing anything, never forgetting the perfect adjective, never forgetting how to spell words such as beautiful or rythym. When I next hunched over my desk to fill in yet another page for yet another day, I was surprised at how meditative I was beginning to find this newly adopted ritual. The act of ignoring that overwhelming pressure to restructure and reword was already becoming unconscious. Stimulus, emotion, thought. Memory, feeling, opinion. 

I don’t know why I felt it important that I make note of that sad, pickled monkey foetus but it was salient and necessary and I’m still thinking about it now. I don’t know why I was so hung up on whether it was a plush toy or a novelty slipper I saw abandoned at the side of the road in the pouring rain, but it struck me and for some reason I remembered it. I realised that I was learning something about myself, beginning to get a handle on why the things that affect me affect me. My journal was becoming a little lead-lined box where, in an inconsequential and controlled environment, I could let my thoughts fall out of me with no consequence. I don’t necessarily mean those “Your guitar playing is shit and your Dad is fitter than you” thoughts. No, I’m definitely not talking about those kinds of thoughts and opinions you hold fully formed but don’t speak aloud because of social consequences such as “I fucking hate how you play Little By Little on that thing and I literally, genuinely wish I met your Dad before I went all in on you.” I’m talking about those small thoughts, the tiny feelings that you often can’t honestly apply meaning or reason to without artistic interpretation, without dramatisation, without being a little… performative. But is being a little artistically minded when it comes to you and your journal a bad thing? Is it really such a pitfall to get a little dramatic if it helps give shape to those butterflies you’ve had all day long when it’s time to put pen to paper? Obviously not. And if the last 1,954 words even briefly made you doubt that, I apologise. I’m just a man writing about his diary because I don’t think I’m in the mindset to write the essay about Max Payne 3 that I keep telling my friends is ‘coming along’. I spent twenty minutes trying to come up with that guitar and hot dad joke from seven sentences ago, but it’s only gonna take me about twenty seconds to tell you that we’ve been performative ever since we started wearing loincloths and harnessing fire. Needless to say, I’m referring to our days as cavemen, and that was a very long time ago indeed.

Now, I have a confession to make. I don’t actually suffer from Sleep Apnea. I didn’t have a fakeout nightmare awakening regarding that tweet either. But maybe you have sleep apnea? Perhaps you had a fakeout nightmare awakening recently? What I’m getting at is, there is absolutely no lived human experience that is truly unique, and although it is hardly ever a comfort in times of hardship to know that every fear, anxiety, mistake, insecurity, pain and superstition you experience has been shared by millions of others- it is an absolute truth. We all need something for ourselves and sometimes that something is a melodramatic page in a notebook where you write something about your day that soothes your mind and heals a small part of you, even if that page does occasionally read like the narration in a 00s coming of age movie, the kind you usually make fun of. But when you wrote that page? Man, you really did feel like the only one in your family with a brain and that girl you saw really did make it seem like the sun shone brighter through the windows on the bus for a moment. Billions of people have written that page. Billions of people have grimaced when they read it back. Billions of people will write another page just like it the next day. Autonomy is a priceless, delicate thing and taking the time to do something for yourself, by yourself, for no reason aside from the desire to do it is one of the most important parts of being a living, thinking thing. Take a photo of it, read it to people, sheepishly insist that it’s private then immediately give in and excitedly put it on display when your friend asks to see it, write an overly-long piece about it in the small creative non-fiction website you’re affiliated with about it- or do none of that. It is a true pleasure to share something personal and heartfelt with someone else who will truly see and appreciate it, but it is an even rarer pleasure to have something in your life that brings happiness to you and only you. I spent years of my life unable to plainly articulate my concerns, worries, stresses and frustrations because I had simply never done it before. Why not? Because I thought it was cringe? What a profound waste of time.

I think I’m going to be proud of every instance where I decide to not change the way I was about to write a sentence in my slightly-overpriced little journal to make it seem more rich and interesting to the outside viewers that do not exist. I’m pushing back against something foolish in my own mind every single time I express a thought in my legible yellow pen with no regard to how it may seem to anyone but myself, which would be far more embarrassing than anything I could write about how I felt last Friday. I’ll maybe never create the kind of television series I do media interviews for while I’m in the shower, and I’ll probably never direct the kind of film I imagine promoting on Hot Ones (which I do quite well at until Da Bomb, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of and ultimately my vulnerable human reaction to it wins over a lot of fence sitters) and I may never write anything as satisfying as what I’ll write in that book on, say, October 14th 2024 in yellow ink. Whatever that’ll be.