2006-10-22 12:54 a.m.
Self Secrecy
How many diaries is it now? Three? Four? And those are just the ones I wrote in. How many more were failed attempts? There had to have been some.
Writing across a number of online journals and at least two paper diaries and a scrapbook has given me an extremely disjointed view of myself. In Diaryland Specimen A we have my tragedies and triumphs for three weeks before I switched back to paper journal 4 for a day before not writing for six and a half months and resuming writing in Diaryland Specimen C. Anyone seeking a narrative thread to my life would be hard put to assemble it from my own source material. Even I don't try to follow it anymore, although I once attempted it, much to my own consternation.
I was browsing journals this evening, in case you're wondering what brought this about. Clicking on titles that were interesting, and reading the author's favorite music and movies and authors, and then seeing how many entries a particular journal held.
Some have been running probably for as long as this site has been up and running. Which is an interesting thought, and got me to thinking about my own scattered past.
I have a horrendous memory. I'll remember someone's laugh and recognize it in a crowded room years after I last heard it, but I won't remember any identifying details other than that particular expression of joy or discomfort. I'll remember the most complex aspect of a subject taught in a course, but be unable to explain the very basic premise of said class.
In much the same way does my memory of my own life function. Hence I rely on my journals, but even these are far too complicated to be bothered with.
We were psychoanalyzing each other for fun the other night. Probably not an activity to be engaging in, as it were, but we were bored, and being of the straight edge and goody two shoes varieties, getting drunk and/or high and/or laid was not exactly an option for any of us. So we discussed our hangups. I wasn't feeling well, so I left long before it would have been my turn, but rather than forgetting the entire thing and drifting merrily off into Dreamland, I stayed awake.
I couldn't get my damn journals out of my mind.
More specifically, I was wondering if there wasn't something underlying my inability to keep any sort of record in a consistently timely fashion, let alone in a linear one. The labyrinthine nature of my journals was no longer a peculiarity of my personality, but quite possibly something fascinating to explore.
On the surface, there's no way to know that any of my journals doesn't proceed from day one of any given writing period and continue exclusively within that journal until such time as it's completed, whether or not it's written daily or weekly or haphazardly, as is my tendency. But read a few dozen pages into it, and dates start taking large leaps, and it's not as though no record at all exists for the missing dates - you merely have to scavenge them out.
So what could this be for? The next day the conversation was resurrected, and we discussed my paper trail.
The consensus was that it's likely for security of some sort. "Against what, though?" I'd asked skeptically. The answer was simple: "either yourself or the world."
How so very, very astute of my friends.
They're right, I suppose. Bury a memory in a journal, then obscure which journal that memory resides in by crossing them so thoroughly that even I am confused, and rely on faulty memory to do the rest in obliterating anything I can't afford to carry around with me for whatever reason. Or do the same, and rely on the disjointed manner in which my personal records are kept to prevent people from rifling through, no matter what the intent.
If the latter is true, and I do this to hide things from the world, it all makes jolly good sense. But if the former is the correct assumption, the entire thing is stood on its head.
What could I possibly be hiding from myself that is so terrible?
Not that I believe that that is the case. However, it does present some interesting concepts to ponder, especially those regarding coping mechanisms and the reasons we employ them when we do. After all, my greatest fears may very well be other people's fascinations.
