#360: Katie’s Journals
A decade of journalling my life
I’m about to start a new notebook — a new journal, to be precise. Every journal is particular to that person, and it is a particularity of character as to whether you refer to it as a diary, a journal, or a notebook. For me, my diary is my planner; my journal is a record of my life.
Yet I have recently realised that every journal of mine is also particular to the person that I was at that particular time. Every journal I have is different, whether in colour, size, or design. When I begin a journal, it has to feel right — the right shape, the right size. Some years I yearn for lines, others it is a blank page that I wish to cover in writing. Yet when I finish a journal, that also feels right, as it becomes time for a new stage in my journalling life.
I started journalling in earnest on the 9th April 2011. I had dabbled before with various diaries, but months would pass where I would forget to write, and when I did remember, the diary more often than not just got filled with too many embarrassing complaints about teen crushes that seemed ridiculous to read even then. I was struggling to figure myself out, and I still am now, but in that Spring my journalling self was born. I covered one, and then two, little red notebook in drawings, creative writing, quotations, and memories, inside and out.
Some pages were full of words about my life, or story ideas, while others were covered in ball-point-pen drawings. In some places, I would write upside down or counter to the lines on the page. I enjoyed the creativity of it, the experimentation, and the privacy.
In two months I had finished that same notebook — the first notebook I had ever finished — and so I started another. And my journalling continued. Ten years on, today is 9th April 2021, and I am about to start my fourteenth journal.
I started my last three journals on airplanes. This is not because a new journey means I need a new journal, but because I never have enough space in my book-filled luggage to carry two journals, only for me to finish one two days into my trip. I started the journal that I am about to finish while sitting on a plane to Boston, USA , in March 2020 — just three weeks before I would return home, and go into lockdown. That journal contains my last glimpses of ‘normal’ life, and a whole year of covid.
There are no airplane trips in my near future, so this time, as in my early journalling days, I will be starting my journal at home. But like with all my journals, this new one has its own peculiarity — fitting, for the strange world we’re living in. I am turning from lines to blank pages — sketchbook pages, which do not open like a standard book, but like a concertina.
As lockdown begins to ease again, and as my life shows the possibility of opening up, if only a little bit, I am turning to this new, and different, notebook. I used to draw in my notebooks, but I haven’t done it for a while, and I don’t know why. But I want to draw again. I want to create, doodle, experiment. More than that, I want to take myself to an art gallery to sit, look, think, draw, write. That is an activity that, I hope, will be possible in the coming months.
So by starting this journal — one that I have saved for years, waiting for just the right moment — I am making a promise to myself, a pledge. When the world opens up, even a little bit, I am going to take myself out into it. And I’m going to note it down — a particular me, in a particular time, and in a particular place.
