Journey to the Center of My Mind

How I learned to stop doomscrolling and start journaling

Do you keep a journal? 

Like a lot of writers I know, I’ve got a shelf filled with mostly blank notebooks and journals. Some are dedicated to specific projects, but most are blank, waiting for me to fill them up with Very Important Thoughts. 

I’ve always been envious of people who managed to keep a diary throughout their childhood. I’ve started countless journals only to abandon them after a handful of entries. 

I remember starting a journal when I was in the Navy. We had just begun a six-month cruise and I thought I’d keep a record of the journey. I wrote a brief entry and set it aside. Of course, someone found it and teased me about it. I hadn’t written anything deeply personal. No bad poetry or secret confessions. I’d written a fairly mundane account of where we were heading, how fast we were going, etc. Basic nautical shit. 

The problem was it was a bit too nautical. I’d shortened “about” to “’bout,” which my shipmate who found it thought was hysterical. He totally picked up on how I was channeling some salty sailor mode of writing with that one tiny contraction and he made a big show out of using it every chance he got. “It’s ‘bout time for chow,” or “It’s ‘bout 1600 hours.” (He was a savagely smart kid from Las Cruces, New Mexico, and was one of my many shipmates who got kicked out of the Navy during the Reagan Regime because of drugs.)

So that was the end of that journal and I regret abandoning it. A few days later the USS Stark was attacked by an Iraqi jet fighter, killing 37 sailors. What was I thinking that day? I’d really like to know.  

Even after I went to college and finally had some privacy I never really got into a groove with my journal writing. I’d dedicate a notebook to the project and after a few entries my studies would get in the way and that would be the end of that. 

The only time in my life I’ve been somewhat reliable as a recorder of my thoughts and feelings is when I travel out of the country. I think there’s something about the newness of everything that compels me to write everything down. 

But that all changed about five years ago when I got the news that my cousin Steve had passed away and I felt the urge to write about him. I didn’t write much but I didn’t want to throw it away when I was done. I wasn’t going to write an essay or an article about him. I just wanted to remember. Plus, I had a hunch that I’d keep writing about him. So I titled the document “Earnest Distractions” and saved it. 

Why Earnest Distractions? I’ve always wanted to publish a book of essays or stories that has the subtitle: “and other earnest distraction.” For example, Memories of a Drunken Sailor and Other Earnest Distractions.  I don’t know about you but I’d buy that book.

This turned out to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because I found that whenever I had some writing to do but wasn’t quite ready to get started, I’d write in my journal instead. It turns out I don’t always feel like working on an essay or story but I always have time for earnest distractions. 

At first, I didn’t write in it every day or even every week but over time I wrote more and more. How much more? Earnest Distractions is now 330 single-spaced pages and 195,000 words.

That’s a lot of distractions. 

So what do I write about? Mostly I write about writing. My journal is the place where I think out loud about whatever I’m working on. It’s also where I discuss how I’m feeling about a certain project, whether it’s a 1,000-word book review or the manuscript of a work-in-progress. I consider my progress (or lack thereof). I identify obstacles. I evaluate how things are going. In other words, I reflect. 

Instead of lying in bed at night dwelling on deadlines, I hash it all out in the journal good, bad, or indifferent. It dawned on me that a lot of the writing I do in Earnest Distractions is anxiety management. By being honest with myself about the work I’m doing (or not doing) and then reflecting on the challenges ahead, I’m relieving my subconscious of that work when I’m trying to do other things like sleep. Then, when I’m done with my journal writing session I’ve got something like a plan of action. 

I don’t just write about writing, of course. I write about the books I’m reading, movies I’ve seen, meetings with colleagues, and conversations with friends. (Back when travel was a big part of my life, I’d write about that as well.) Sometimes when I’m particularly down on myself for not finishing a project, looking at all the other stuff helps me be realistic. To put it another way, the journal is where I go to cut myself slack. 

This has been hugely helpful since the pandemic started when time has gotten slippery and it’s very easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. I’m in the middle of a big project right now and I’d be lost without my journal.

Of course, the very obvious benefit of writing about work-in-progress is sometimes I generate ideas. Sometimes in the course of procrastinating on an essay or review I’ll hit on the idea that gets me started. Earnest Distractions is full of first drafts of first pages, opening paragraphs, initial thoughts. It is quite a magical thing to go from bitching about a looming deadline to actually writing the thing without actually sitting down to write it. 

An earnestly distracted John Steinbeck

I think this approach owes something to John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. When Steinbeck was writing East of Eden he wrote a series of letters to his editor on one side of the notebook and the manuscript to East of Eden on the other. The letters are full of fascinating details that have everything and nothing to do with the writing of East of Eden: Steinbeck obsessing over sharpening his pencils or lamenting his ferocious hangovers. Even though I’m pretty sure Steinbeck would have been appalled by the publication of Journal of a Novel, I loved being inside his brain during the writing of the novel. Turns out he’s just as insecure and overconfident as the rest of us, and the journal is a barometer for his feelings about the book. I loved it so much I never bothered to read East of Eden. I’d already lived through the creation of it. Why did I need to read it?

Here’s what Maria Popova had to say about it:

“One of the most beautiful aspects of the letters is the sincerity with which they reveal the inseparability of an artist’s selfhood and personal life, with all of its elations and anguishes, from his art.”

I don’t have to worry about anyone publishing Earnest Distractions. I’m not John Steinbeck, and I promise you it’s not that interesting, but no one can accuse me of being insincere.

Earnest Distractions only engages with the world intermittently, which is fine, but the other day I searched the document to see how many times I’d mentioned Trump. The answer was surprising: only 12. At first, I was a little embarrassed by this. What does this say about me? Imagine discovering a diary of a German carpenter who survived World War II only to find out there are only a handful of references to Hitler but hundreds of passages about the fucking birdhouses he built. Am I that blinkered little birdhouse builder? 

I typically write in my journal in the morning in between checking email and Twitter and before getting to work. There have been many, many times over the last four years when my writing in Earnest Distractions represents a retreat from the abominations of the Trump administration to a place where I’m nominally in control. Has anyone ever felt like they were in control while doomscrolling Twitter?

Over time Earnest Distractions has become an extension of my memory. I love how searchable the journal is. For instance, I can tell you that during the summer I started this journal after attending my cousin’s funeral in New York I wrote the bulk of My Damage with Keith Morris, and finished the summer with a weekend trip to Valle de Guadalupe with Nuvia. That’s a sentence I could not have written without the journal. My cousin’s death, working with Keith, going to the valle where Nuvia and I were married all sit in different parts of my brain and linking them together like that doesn’t come naturally. With the journal all of that data is retrievable, and I’m here to tell you it’s not too late to start.

Speaking of Keith, he’s mentioned 192 times in my journal. Nuvia? Only 157. What can I say? I love Keith. 

Sadly, my adventures in journal writing haven’t stopped me from buying new blank journals. I especially like buying cheap notebooks in foreign countries. But now that I do all my journaling on a computer, I’ve found new purposes for these journals: creating colorful to-do lists and hand writing short stories, but those are subjects for another newsletter….