#190: Another Diary
A space to process
It’s been a tough weekend for a couple of reasons, one being that I have been sick again, and so have spent the last couple of days pottering around my flat staring at the same familiar objects, wondering what original thoughts I could have about a duster, a drinking glass, a basil plant.
Then I watched this video and realised I hadn’t said all I could say about my diary, or the function it has been performing recently. And as my current diary is a different diary to the one in my previous blog post, and so technically I am talking about a different object, I decided this was justification enough to talk again about that thought-filled notebook.
When I first wrote about my diary, I said: “diaries can have very different purposes”. And thinking about the purpose my diary is fulfilling now, and the purpose it fulfilled then, this has proved very true.
That object once was a place to hold half-formed thoughts, things I wasn’t quite ready to put out into the world, things I was deciding whether or not I should do or say. Now it has become more retrospective, more an attempt to get an understanding of the events of the last year.
The video I linked above explains how we might need a novel about ourselves to truly be able to understand and analyse our life, to make connections between events and people, and come to a higher level of self-awareness and self-compassion. I think this might be the function my diary is currently taking.
So much has happened this last year that my processing has not been able to keep up with it. It feels like I have had time to merely have an immediate reaction to events, but not time to truly get over them and understand them in a wider context. I am a naturally slow-processor, and I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way, I just think a lot about things from many angles and cannot be sure how I feel until I have had time to really explore that thing. I have to factor in time and space within busy weeks to just be by myself, to let the events sink in, to make sense of the hustle and bustle, to make a narrative out of the chaos of life.
I don’t think I have given myself that time recently, not to the extent I need it. The odd shower, the walk to work, the washing up — these are the times I have given myself to simply think, but they are not enough. In some ways I think I have been afraid to think alone. But that is why I have my diary. I have its pages as companions to my thoughts. I have its lines as hands to hold my words.
And soon, I hope, we will make some sense of things.
