Capturing Chaos

I don’t know if I’m unique in habitually throwing away my old journals. It seems that most people keep theirs as a source of ideas, or just to see how their writing has changed over time—how they have changed. One reason I throw mine away is that it’s too tedious to read over so many pages of my handwriting. I had the mad idea of eventually typing all those pages into computer files, but that turned out to be one of those what-was-I-thinking brainstorms.

I’ve tried journaling on the computer in the hope that It would be easier to keep at it, and that I would be less tempted to toss. But it turns out that it isn’t just my handwriting that’s the problem; it’s the repetition. And when I started thinking about that, I realized that my journals have two kinds of material. One is my life; all the moaning about problems and vowing to break out of old habits that keep me from accomplishing my goals. Over and over again. Who wants to look back over the years and face the ugly fact that you’ve been saying the same things pretty much forever, that you haven’t changed and aren’t likely to change? Continue Reading »