Record your life, write it all.

Why you should journal, why your ordinary life should be recorded. Unique beings create unique stories.

August 14 2010, Moving Day

When my parents decided to move for the fifth time while I was in school, I grabbed the huge clear IKEA box and stuffed my books in there. These were as precious as things could get, and as tender as my heart, these paperbacks were the only thing worth saving. Little Mary loved many things, and the books were more than love.

My bed had a built-in shelf into it, and sometimes I’d lay down and put my favorite books closer to me in case a fire were to erupt. That way, as I scramble for my life, I’d grab my stuffed bunny and the best of my books. During many moves and shifts, mostly due to my fathers job, I would pack my books first. If I forgot everything else, I never noticed. During that move, I remember vividly arranging my books until that entire box was filled to the top. I couldn’t carry it, so my mother said she’d get it, and I sat in the car as we drove for hours to see our new home. We didn’t play music in the car, but it was quiet more than peaceful. Those long car rides were always the heaviest. I looked at my sister and my brother, both asleep, but I always stayed awake. I figured if we got into an accident, I’d have to be awake to save them all. 

Our new house was white with very subtle cream colored walls. I thought it was the most boring looking place to live, but I knew we’d move again like we always did. In the backyard, there was one large tree. I cannot remember what kind, but it was big enough to block my vision of the sky. I spent endless hours under it reading. Endless hours hugging that tree. What a strange kid. 

As I unpacked things, I noticed that the box I had so carefully stuffed was missing. Gone. I waited for weeks in case my father decided to get it shipped, if some van would drop it off one day, but it never came. To say I cried would be an understatement. I was hysterical, I was inconsolable.

My father wanted to make it up, somehow, but he knew better than to buy books for me. Half my joy came from walking around a bookstore for hours, so he never stripped that away from me. I was doing well in English class, my teacher contacted my father to tell him I had potential and that he didn’t have to worry about me keeping up with the curriculum. So that year, my father bought me a pink colored journal with a matching pen.

“I won’t buy you books, write your own” he said. 

This was the beginning of many many letters, chapters, poems, essays, rants, and short stories. I mourn the box of lost novels and comics, I still hope that one day I’ll look far enough and find it, but I have also written more stories than I could remember. So if there was a fire today, I’d carry this box of my journals, my stories and my life with all the records in there.

Maybe I became much like my grandmother because of it. A woman who has kept every photo, every memory for years. I remember seeing things as old as the dusty clock in her room just plastered on her closet. She has boxes stacked with photos and letters. Her room is more memories than it is clothes or perfume bottles. This wonderful lady that would let me rummage through an endless tunnel of all that she’s kept, I am now morphing into her.

Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

I wonder if we’d know what we do about who Sylvia Plath was, or Franz Kafka or Orwell, or even Emerson if it weren’t for their extensive journals and diaries. Recorded like memory capsules, in their voices with their own eyes. You may not be Kafka, but you possess the magic to write if you are lucky, so how can you do nothing about it? I’ve recorded many moments in these notebooks, and I’m sure there is a shelf of them back home, and another shelf lost in shipping, but they sound more like me than my voice. 

In one of my journals, I remember the first page so clearly. I wished I could find it, but I must’ve left it back home because it was many years ago. I had a hotel pen, and in the blank page I wrote, completely from memory:

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

Sylvia Plath

You don’t always have to write for yourself. Write for someone next to you, around you, a stranger, someone you know. You can never run out of people, you can never run out of words. I find myself writing for strangers all the time. This was in Lisbon, 2023. For a woman, all alone, right by the water while I listened to Tom Waits— I hope I don’t fall in love with you.

What can I write about?

I cannot say there’s one thing worth writing about more than another because I’m still the kid who hugs trees, and so I never run out of subjects. You say what can I write about, I say write about it all. Even the very absence of having nobody, having no subject, is itself worth writing for. The void, the vast space you wonder in, every atom that makes you up and every cut that tears you down, these are all just happenings waiting to be written.

I told a friend of mine to start keeping a journal, for her own good. She is a wonderful person, filled with strange thoughts for the world and curiosities. I find myself often saying ‘you should write that down’ whenever she’d say something.

“I live the same day everyday, what would I write about?” she asked.

That. Just that routine. Your sickness, your health. We might wake up everyday the same way, but we don’t sleep the same. Does your emptiness expand by the time the night comes or does it shrink? Do you smile that day? Do you fall and curse the car that startled you, or is your walk peaceful? Although much of your day is the same, you change with it every second you choose to write.

Routine. Regularity. Maybe a few pages into writing the same day, you’ll get the courage to strip in public and jump into that fountain at the mall then write about it. Maybe you will start seeking experiences in the real world so your journal would be entertaining.

Write the people you know letters.

Poems. Terrible poems. The more agonizing the better.

Spell things how they sound not how they ought to be written.

Your dreams.

Nightmares.

Draw. Sketch. Pictures.

Essays.

Tear soaked pages.

Love stories.

Heartbreak.

Write about his eyes. His smile. His ego. The way he pronounces Gnocchi,

The sun.

Your pillow.

Does your body ache?

Joy.

Home.

The time it takes before you make the first step.

Regret. Guilt.

Your brother who keeps drinking.

The boat you find sinking.

Mother’s hurtful words.

Money.

Do you like money?

Train. Planes. Trips. Travels. Drives. Highways.

Paintings.

The man who plays the saxophone in the streets.

Birds. There’s so many birds.

I must’ve misspelled every word on this journal entry. But as the train leaves, and you realize the day is ending, you care less. Write it the way you want, the English language won’t criticize.

There is no right or wrong way to go about this. It’s simply trying to vomit every thought, no matter how disturbing, onto a paper that will do nothing but keep it safe. Sadly, I haven’t built enough courage to show the deep ocean of my journal entries, perhaps when I die I’d mind a lot less and you could all riffle through the pages. But for now, I hold these pages as close to my heart as every breath.

When I first got into writing every moment, I assumed I had to do it everyday. Like I had this assignment and I’d get scolded for missing out one day. In reality, there are no rules to keeping it. No rules at all.

In fact, you don’t even need a journal to write in. I don’t often carry my notebook, so if I feel the itch creeping up my sweater, I would write on a napkin, a receipt, a newspaper. Even a book. Sometimes deciphering a poem is journaling. Sometimes writing two lines is enough. Sometimes you need half a book to speak. Write what you feel and think, do not neglect one for the other. Both your thoughts and feelings make you, give them space to be processed on paper.

A page with my favorite poem as I try to write about it. There’s always poetry to write for and write about. How do you read a poem? How do you feel? Does it make you…alive?

I have been a sentimental, emotional, logical, piece of clay all my life, and yet I find more things to write about than to neglect. All parts of you are worth writing about, but not all people can see you. You hide and you play the victim and you avoid people, so how can they know you?

You cannot write about what is layered. You must reduce it down to the smallest being before you understand it. So do you know who you are enough to fill a book or a column? In your naked, vulnerable, hysterical, mad state, what can you write?

Many nights, especially colder ones, I feel like writing is all I have left in the world.

There was a man who smiled at me, and I remember locking eyes with him for an entire minute. The way his eyes stared into mine. His smile. I never saw him again, and I don’t suppose I ever will, but as soon as I was in my apartment, I laid down on my stomach, my bare breasts against the bed sheets, pen and notebook in hand and the sound of the wind all making me write nearly two pages worth of him.

There is more to write about with each passing second.

I have train journeys. Road trips. Love letters. Kisses. Sex. Scents. Polaroids. Movie tickets. Song lyrics. Albums. Stickers. Postcards. Envelopes. Flowers. Dead, but flowers nonetheless. My grandmothers kindest words. Strangers conversations. Bookmarks. Gifts. Thank you letters. Wedding invitations. Funerals. Stamps. Magazine shreds. Newspaper headlines.

Keep the notebook in your bag. Keep it right next to your bed because creativity sometimes strikes, and you’ll jump out of bed scrambling to write it and not forget it. Keep it with you at all times.

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Sylvia Plath.

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

Aldous Huxley.

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

Franz Kafka

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

Louis L'Amour

I hope you write until you are sick, I hope you write while your fingers are still steady and your mind is still clear. Write before your memory becomes too unreliable, write before your pen starts to tremble or your vision goes away. Tell it all, even the ordinary and most uninteresting things, your stories matter my darling.

For the sake of your unique life, one that no one could ever live the same, one that no one could ever feel the same, write about it. Write your dullest moments like they mean something because they do. You’re creation is beyond events, it’s every dent you make into the universe as you do ordinary things. Your likeness does not exist anywhere else. You do no exist twice. Write about it once.

Love,

until you find much more love,

MaryT.