My Social Media-less Life

A lot of things have happened over the last week to cause me to feel like “now is a good time to write.”

And then I came home from my Chicago trip and it felt like the world was falling down around me.

I’d like to say I’m okay with a certain amount of stress, but something about only working three days after spending five days in a different city and another day at the fair with a 7- and a 6-year-old boy really did me in.

By Wednesday, I knew I would have to cancel all social events, planned or otherwise.

By Friday, everything seemed like a normal day.

The good news there is that the awkward stress that I was feeling— along with the lack of sleep— finally let up.

I’m still working on the lack of sleep part, but my schedule (and apparently what my brain thought of the schedule) no longer seems overwhelming.

I’m still working on cleaning out my room, but I think that will be finished before next weekend.

All of what I told you is definitely just a small backstory. This is where the actual reason I opened this app and started typing comes in.

After the long week I just had, I decided to pick up my daily journals and look at them to see how long it’s been. Maybe I should actually start planning my tomorrows instead of just winging it, I thought to myself.
Wanna take a guess at how long it’s been since I last used any of my journals?

Three months.

I’ve gone periods of time not using my journals, and it tends to be around the summertime that I don’t use them. But it’s never felt like it’s only been a few weeks when it’s definitely been a few months.

I would say “time is a flat circle” except that saying confuses me more than describing time as a “big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.”

It’s been anywhere from 12-20 years since the last time I saw The Music Man (whether a play or a movie), but anytime I open my journal and the last completed entry says May 24, I think of that one line that Harold Hill says to Marian:

Oh, my dear little librarian. You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you’ve collected nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to make today worth remembering.

There are other reasons I’ve always loved that quote, but whenever I open a sad and unused journal, that quote hits me and… I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Maybe it’s a “yes-and” thing.

Yes, I’ve had a lot of fun this summer, doing things with people and making memories… and I don’t have any physical, written documentation about it.

My mom even talks about when she journals every morning and I always think, “Oh, I should do that when I get home,” and there’s always something “more important” to do.

Journaling is a great thing because not only are you writing down what happened in your day while it’s still fresh (even if it’s the next morning, in my mom’s case), but you’re also helping yourself remember it because you’re writing it down. And something about writing things down really does help your brain remember it better.

Josh Taylor of BlimeyCow recently mentioned this journaling app he uses to document his life and I downloaded it thinking it might help me at least get back into journaling… and then thought, “There are a lot of things I don’t mind typing, but I don’t know that keeping track of my life like this will really help me REMEMBER like writing it down will.”

So I deleted the app after about a week of wrestling with myself. I didn’t start journaling after that however… otherwise this blog post might not even exist… or it would be much shorter with different pictures and maybe less backstory at the start.

The biggest reason for this blog post is simply to have a little more accountability in my life when it comes to journaling. I have about 5 different journals I could write in. All of them are what I would consider “active” journals; as in, they all have a similar but different purpose and they all need to be “filled in” from time to time.

For me, the trouble with journaling is that I WANT to do it, but it feels so time-consuming. What I NEED to look at is the long-term goal of the satisfaction that my life has been documented for my future self… and that’s what I really want to accomplish.

And maybe have something my nephews and niece can use to learn a little more about me in the far future when I’m no longer around for them to ask me questions.