Another practice I’ve taken up, linked to journaling, is remembrance of women. Read Who Cooked the Last Supper, read Invisible Women, look up Jenny von Westphalen or Rosalind Franklin or Choi Mal-ja or Hadiyah-Nicole Green or Wahida Amiri and you know what this is about. What better ways to have those names on the tip of your tongue if you need references when speaking or writing, than collating them together somewhere you can find them easily? And that remembrance is twofold: I write down their names and their deeds and experiences; and I recite their names like a prayer, when I’m taking a walk, or waiting for a train, or struggling to fall asleep. Women to look up to, women to be inspired by, women who accomplished things, women who can be used as models, and some ordinary women too, and some of the women in my life, all gathered in a litany against loneliness and oblivion.
26 June, 2026 ✏︎ Notes on 15 years of keeping a journal
What follows is a short essay I wrote going into some detail about why it is so important to me to have my diary, commonplacing, and sketchbook all together in one book. I thought I’d post it here in case anyone finds something resonant in my reflections. 🌠
If you keep a journal, perhaps you've noticed (as I have) that your journal is not only a rendering of your attitudes, ideas, and feelings; that there is a reciprocity, a feedback loop where the way you habitually use your notebook guides what you notice, how you feel, and how you inhabit your days.
I have been journaling for fifteen years; I am 27 now and began keeping a diary at the age of 12. In the beginning, I would make my journals myself by deconstructing spiral-bound one-subject notebooks and creating construction-paper covers and stapling it all together (basically the same thing I am doing now, except with much fancier paper!). I used these handmade booklets until I got my first laptop at 15. That night, I wondered what would happen if I journaled on my computer instead—and for the next five years, that's what I did.
Those digital journals are hard to read. They were written during the end of high school and the beginning of college—a chaotic and confusing time in my life and a period when I was pretty mentally unwell and struggling to get the help I needed. But it's not just that fact that makes the journals difficult to look back on. It's also because of what the format of journaling digitally allowed me to do.
Back then it was not unusual for me to sit typing in my bed for hours, essentially having an emotional breakdown on paper. There was no friction, nothing to intervene and slow the runaway train of my thoughts. I would often get up in the middle of class, dinner, a party, go outside or to the bathroom and type furiously into my phone, desperately trying to relieve the pressure of words in my head. We hear so much about journaling as a tool we can use to care for our mental health, but for me it felt like the opposite: like a compulsion that amplified my anxiety and was actively making my mental health worse.
In the years since then, my wish to transform my journal has been completely coextensive with my wish to get better. And part of that process has been accepting that not everything needs to be put into words. I have been learning that I do not need to convert every experience, impression, and feeling into a sentence. I am learning to let things take more nebulous forms.
Another way to put this is that I am learning to ask questions that only art can answer.
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I often say that I want my journal to feel more like a creative workbook than a diary; I want it to be a place for my creative practice to unfold, a tool I use to engage more thoughtfully with art and connect more attentively to the world around me.
It's like in Ozu films, how he will insert shots that are basically just still-lifes, like a vase in the alcove, in the middle of an emotional scene. There’s not necessarily any symbolism, nothing illustrative about the vase—but it’s also more than mere scene-setting. It’s a way of keeping the human narrative, it’s temporality, in balance. That’s how I think of the photographs and commonplacing content that I include in the pages of my journal. It’s more than just memory-keeping or study. It’s really a matter of composition, of keeping my own inner story in proportion and in context.
[Still from Late Spring directed by Yasujiro Ozu]
If I’m walking down the street and I’m absorbed completely in my thoughts, and I’m not noticing what’s around me, I see that as an analogue for one way I could write in my journal. To simply take a picture of the flowerpot that my neighbor has on their stoop that I thought was beautiful and print that out in my notebook—that is an act of saying, I don’t have to imprison myself in my own inner world. I am part of the world and when I notice things around me, and let those things become pillars around which my thoughts can flow, then I am okay. I’m not trapped inside my head. There are windows and doors in and out.
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But old habits die hard. I still sometimes feel like all I do is write things down because nothing feels real until I put it into words. At times, I reach this sad, horrible point where I become almost averse to interesting things, because my mind is already so saturated with thoughts that I just can't take any more input. What this amounts to is that I don’t know how to trust my mind and memory to keep anything safe. I don’t trust my mind to be able to make distinctions between what is important and what is trivial.
I've felt this way for more or less my whole life, but now I think the internet and social media are increasingly generalizing this experience of information-overload for everyone. This is the cost of brain rot: it erodes the trust we have in our own minds.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the Zettelkasten method and various people’s approaches to Personal Knowledge Management as I’ve returned to building out a digital garden using Tiddlywiki. There’s a theme you see over and over when people talk about digital gardening: the idea of a structure that promotes serendipity. When you start, your impulse is probably to create a structure for yourself to work within. You might want to create a list of categories or topics or keywords around things you’re interested in and that you expect to be gathering notes about. But everyone who has a robust digital garden seems to say that this is going to impede the long-term success of this kind of note-taking practice. Niklas Luhmann, who had a famous paper Zettelkasten system comprised of nearly 100,000 notes on slips of paper, talked about “communicating” with his Zettelkasten. His Zettelkasten was like another person in that it could surprise him; he couldn’t always predict what it might return in response to a query.
Eventually a Zettelkasten gets to a point where there are so many notes, and so many relations and connections between those notes, that you can forget you made them and can thus encounter them in new contexts. That’s how you get surprise, serendipity, unexpected connections, and ultimately new knowledge.
[Commonplacing in my binder (left); my Index of Keywords in my digital garden (right)]
It blew my mind when I realized that the best advice is to stop trying to map every connection and sort everything. One should let topic clusters arise rather than predetermining them, because this literally limits what one is capable of noticing and saying. It’s not that the digital garden has no structure—it’s that you have to let the structure emerge on its own over time.
I’ve often felt like the only way to address the wealth of information available to me is to become a martyr to processing, interpreting, sifting through it all—to vanquish and quiet the chaos in my head through brute-force organization, compartmentalization, discipline.
But I'm realizing that, not only is this doomed to fail, leaving me depressed and exhausted, there’s actually something valuable about leaving things uninterpreted and disorganized—or, about sublimating them, letting them germinate, dissolve, vanish into the depths, and perhaps resurface at some future moment unrecognizable and transformed.
What I’m learning is that in my journaling practice, whether that’s in a digital tool or in my notebook, my goal shouldn’t necessarily be to understand everything, but to learn to live with what is beyond the grasp of the operations of my mind. To leave the vase on the shelf without turning into a symbol, without forcing upon it some meaning—just to notice it, and to be in the room with it while my story unfolds. ✦
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Sources I referenced or drew from in this post:
Wesley Anna, "how i digital garden in capacities and why it changed how i use the internet," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgeqRXoB3c8
"Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing," https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/
Donald Richie, Ozu: His Life and Films, University of California Press, 1977.
reading through your teenage self’s journals is a good dose of perspective— the girl writing was happy with simple things, the girl writing didn’t know what migraine auras were or that they could affect your mood, the girl writing hasn’t finished high school yet, the girl writing is excited about her new job, the girl writing just started driving, the girl writing didn’t know the people she was meeting would eventually traumatize her, the girl writing is a poet, the girl writing is tucking mementos into the pages for me to find, the girl writing is inconsistent and leaves half the book blank for me to fill in because she hopes I will remember, the girl writing hasn’t totaled her car yet, the girl writing is scared to start college, the girl writing hasn’t been abandoned by everyone she trusted yet, the girl writing hasn’t met my best friend yet, the girl writing is terrified of disappearing, the girl writing hasn’t read my favorite book yet, the girl writing doesn’t know how to take care of her curly hair, the girl writing is putting glow in the dark stars on my ceiling so I don’t forget what it was like to be her
A few important journaling tenets. If it ever feels like a chore, something needs to change. Write down what matters to you. Do not constrain yourself with appearance; at first just write. It doesn’t need sophistication, or to be aesthetically pleasing—I started with the time I woke up at, the weather, and a record of what I eat in a day, all in gray pencil, pages and pages of it, monotonous. It needs to serve you; write down the things you want to remember and hold on to. Don’t show it to anyone else, make it a sanctuary of your own. Let it grown and evolve as its usefulness changes, but above all let it remain a tool for you, and not another proof of status.
I took up journaling over a year ago, about the time I came back on here, with two goals in mind. First, as a way of keeping a record of my life, because despite my excellent memory the past year felt like a black-hole of non-existence. I took almost no photos, kept no physical traces of my own experiences and existence, and as a result, it felt—and still does—as if I had not lived during that time. Second, as a reminder not to share to much on the internet. I’m a firm believer that a great part of what makes up our existence’s worth on this earth is our unique perspective, the secrets that each one of us carries around, all the things that we alone noticed. Our observation grounds reality in its own existence, and we’re here to beheld all those marvels, and mostly so in the privacy of our own mind. My own belief in my indispensability in this world is based on all those thoughts and observations nobody else could make. If I share them all with every body else, if I don’t have secrets and wonders to hold, then what is the point? Also, everything about privacy and data-mining and not being a product to be exploited. Enter the journals.
Also, are you understanding, integrating, engaging with the thousand of words you come across each day, be it here or anywhere else in the Internet or in the books and magazines you go through? What about the information you hear on the radio, the one you see on television or youtube, the ones shared with you by friends and family and colleagues and random acquaintances? Where do these informations go? Can you swear you’ll remember it tomorrow? In a week? Next month? Can you pinpoint why it made you feel that way? Why you thought the overall message was this and not that? Why you thought this political entity or this corporation was trying to manipulate you? Did you link it with the knowledge and reasonings you already hold? Where does it fit in the tapestry of your life? Write it down.
