I don’t remember a time I didn’t write.

The “I don’t remember a time” introduction is one of my favourite clichés: I wonder if everyone else is also exaggerating?

I remember when journalling wasn’t a thing I did, and what’s my style of writing but edited journalling, to greater or lesser degrees.

I have a box full of filled notebooks now, but I remember the first one, an actual “My Diary” with a tiny, useless lock that thrilled me with its implication of importance. It was a birthday present. My twelfth birthday, I believe.

Unless memory fails, the first entry went something like this:

Entry one:
Dear Diary,
I'm so glad you're here.
We're going to be the best of friends.
I'm going to tell you everything. 
Love, 
Me.

Entry two:

In my defense, nobody knew what they were doing when it came to diaries. Journalling was just pushing into public consciousness: I don’t remember a single article about it from my teen years, and I read the magazines that these days talk about it monthly all the time.

I wish I’d known about bullet journals. I find them very appealing though my self-consciousness still worries about doing them wrong.

As though there’s someone who shows up to grade me.

I didn’t start journalling in earnest until I got to university. Trite, but true. I’d been given another journal, this one on my nineteenth birthday: I still have it – “A Woman’s Journal for a Woman’s Thoughts.”

It’s full of bad poetry and sad confessions. Written by me, it didn’t come with them. It was pink and I loved how each page was anchored with a quote.

I started writing in it when I started decompensating that first year. It’s one of the things that saved me, another cliché, but then, what are clichés but well-worn truths?

Being able to vent, to release the emotions eating me up from the inside out allowed me to stay in the game long enough to find a solution.

I still journal, albeit with appropriate capitalization and punctuation these days – my early efforts were lowercase – why do you suppose pain and capital letters don’t mix; or is it young adulthood and capital letters – but one thing hasn’t changed over the years:

Most of the time, I’ve no idea what I’m going to say. It’s as true of the keyboard as it is of the pen, though correctly the former is tidier. The not-knowing could be a problem at university, where professors worship at the shrine of the outline I struggled to write.

“No idea” isn’t entirely accurate. I know how I plan to start, mostly, and I know the point I’m trying to make, mostly, but what happens en route is a bit of a mystery.

It’s informed by many things – who I am, what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been listening to, my philosophies, my mood – but most of the time, my writing feels like a trip of discovery down a detour or side road.

Not unlike what happens if you mistakenly use Google Maps instead of a competent GPS.

The way I write is not unlike how I speak. I’m anecdotal when it comes to making a point.

I guess that’s why my perfectionist tendencies tolerate such haphazard ways. I’m aware that I get it done in the end.

Besides, if you preprogram every detail, the writing – and the days – get boring.

---