I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 49 of 100.
I know everything that happened for two weeks of my life when I was eleven.
OK, not everything. I know that I went to Girl Scout camp and ate a “walking salad”; that my uncles got married and I met a nice girl named Elisa at their wedding; I saw the movie “Hercules” in the theater; and “we started to go to a beautiful swimming pool, but they charged us $60 so we didn’t go.”
I know this because for my birthday in 1997, my grandmother gave me an elegant gold-plated, leather-bound page-a-day diary, with the pages pre-dated, and as an eleven-year-old I was able to keep up the habit of writing my observations down once per day for two entire weeks. Which, let’s be honest, is quite a triumph for an eleven-year-old with undiagnosed ADD.
But I remember the frustrations I had when I kept this diary. The pages were small. I like writing long, scrawling diatribes, and this page-a-day journal only afforded me a paragraph or two, even if I made my handwriting tiny. In the month of July, when this diary was active, I wasn’t having a lot of longings about boys or friends or anything; the summer was starting to get stretchy and deep, and mostly I was waiting to have feelings. The very final entry in this diary is from July 17, and it says, “I’ve got a new thinking subject! 6th grade. I hope Fontaine Lewis didn’t get Play Productions as an election.” Presumably, I went out and got another diary after that, where I could go on for pages and pages about how much I hated Fontaine Lewis.
I’ve always felt sorry for this diary. It was a pretty diary with a lot of potential, but ultimately it stayed mostly blank for 23 years as it traveled around with the rest of my diary collection, which contains at least one hundred not-blank-at-all other diaries. Right now I am writing a book about my old diaries, and I go through them a lot. I’ll open the one with the carousel horse on it and go, “Oh, Young Sophie. So much I wish I could tell you; so much I wish you could tell me.” It’s like having a simultaneously forthcoming and aloof pen pal.
But then I would come to this pretty, leather-bound diary with just fourteen pages filled, and I’d feel sad for it. I could not return to 1997 and compel Young Sophie to keep writing in it. I could not make it new again, either.
Or could I? One day last winter, I realized that I had agency over my sadness for this barely-used diary. I could finish it! So I'd waited 23 years to finish it. So what? There are no rules when it comes to diaries. You get to do whatever you want with them.
And this is how I came to take up page-a-day diary writing in my 30s, in the very year that there just happened to be a global pandemic
I began writing in the page-a-day on January 1, 2020. I wrote, “I’ve decided to return to this as a 33-year-old woman. It felt like a waste of a book.” Then I wrote, “I spent the day with Bobby, Dina, Luke, and Sean. The apartment had lovely hanging plant configurations. I wandered into an empty room with empty cans and a mattress along the wall. The sun shone. I had one cigarette.”
I liked how all those words sounded when I read them back. They were mostly facts and not judgements. (I guess thinking the plant configurations were “lovely” was a judgement, but also, it was a fact.) More importantly, I had not written anything about my feelings.
I have another diary (Journal? Notebook? Captain’s Log?) for my feelings. I write in it a lot! I have a lot of feelings. I’d say about 41 percent of the time my other diary helps me sort out my feelings, 22 percent of the time it seems to make my feelings bigger and worse, 13 percent of the time I spend pages planning out my day, and 24 percent of the time I complain about being fat and being fatphoic and wanting to be thin and wanting to not want to be thin. I have kept diaries like these since at least 1993, which is the earliest date written in any of my diaries. (In 1993 I had “the badest day” because I “bit my toung.” Many, many feelings.)
With the exception of the three years or so that I semi-meticulously kept up with Morning Pages, the feelings diaries are sporadic and kind of manic. A month will pass, and then I’ll write twenty pages about how I want to be a better cartoonist and how I am proud of my love life. There are big missing chunks in the chronology where, I don’t know, I thought everything was boring or I was busy binge-watching “Ugly Betty” and painting all the birds in North America, and couldn’t be bothered to write in my diary.
But what if I were to make it a habit to write one little page of observations every day for the rest of the year? What if I let this habit be easy? It could take five minutes. It could take fewer! On some days, maybe, I’d just write a sentence in passing. I could do this. I did not blame eleven-year-old Sophie for not being able to do it, because she did not understand that you could keep two or even three diaries at one time. But Adult Sophie could do it.
And she has done it. Friends, this is the single best new thing I have taken on in 2020, and maybe in the past decade it. It was such a simple thing, and it shifted my whole life. Here are the ways in which this is true:
I started noticing smaller things day to day. It’s not that I never noticed small things before; it’s just that I would notice them and discard them, because where was I supposed to put them? There have been periods in the past where I’ve tried to keep up with Lynda Barry’s four-minute diary, which is a similar practice of noticing. But honestly? I do not always have four uninterrupted minutes. The Page-A-Day takes less time and can be done while multitasking. Would it be better to spend four sacred minutes keeping a diary every day? Sure! Was that realistic for me? No.
Because I also often fall behind three days, and then sit and catch up. I close my eyes and collect whatever images are sticky in my brain. I use my day planner to remind me what I had planned to do on those days, and use my plans to pique my memory. I often remember only what I ate. Which is enough. Food images are LOVELY.
The act of filling one page every day with the smallest of images that would absolutely otherwise get lost floods me with relief. I am often worried that I am not doing enough; that I am wasting my life on earth; that I’m failing. Writing down just a few things I saw in a single day makes my life feel different. I feel like I haven’t been wasting anything; I’ve been living!
Two weeks ago I filled in eight days in a row. That was a long time to go without writing; the longest, I think, that I’ve gone since January 1. When I sat down to write, I felt hollowed and sad. But as I filled in the pages — relief! I felt like, “Oh! I’ve been doing things. I’ve been seeing and smelling and hearing things. I’ve been alive this whole time."
It has created a steady rhythm inside of quarantine. Every page is the same size and shape, and so every day appears to also be the same size and shape. In my body, the length of every day feels like a riddle. Some days are so long that they feel like whole weeks. Other days (and weeks) slide together into nothing-sized moments. The pages in my diary remind me that time is actually a steady thing, even though the pandemic likes to laugh an evil laugh and say, “TIME IS MEANINGLESS YOU ARE NOTHING I AM EATING YOUR SOUL."
Just like doing a few squats every day keeps your legs in relative shape, writing a few sentences every day keeps your writing practice in relative shape. I like the writing in my page-a-day! It’s kind of lovely. It’s different than a lot of the other writing I do. And when I sit down to do the other kind of writing (this kind of writing!), it comes more easily because my writing muscles are always moving, even if it’s just a little bit.
If you decide that this is something you would like to try, I have a few suggestions:
Find a small book. If the pages aren’t already pre-dated, pre-date them. Make it so the page will be ruined if you don’t write something on it.
I think a “line-a-day” diary doesn’t afford enough space. Sometimes you have to draw a peony, because you just do.
This is what people used to use diaries for exclusively! And it’s how we learn many of the important things we know about history. I guess that’s not a suggestion so much as it is a reassurance that you’re in great company.
Write observations and not feelings. It is okay to write observations OF feelings. The difference is between “I felt sad” and “I felt sad and I’m not sure why and I’m still sad now and maybe it is because of Alex."
Do not feel that you must be precious.
Do not feel that you mustn’t be precious.
Here are a few random pages from my Page-A-Day 2020 / 1997. (For the days in 1997 where the pages were already filled, I placed a yellow Post-it on top of the page to write a few thoughts for 2020.):
January 15, 2020
We saw two men walking along Smith & Bybee Lakes, one said, “Good wildlife out here, huh?” Alexis jumped up & down in the snow to try to jiggle her baby out. At the grocery store I was impressed with all the vegan sandwiches. Woof the dog wasn’t allowed on the walk & licked my fingers in the car.
February 4, 2020
I laughed while:
Talking to Bob on the phone about Grey’s Anatomy
Talking to Bethany over peanut rice in the living room
Making jokes in the classroom with the kids.
I ate chicken’s eggs. Foot attacked me before that. I read about ancient pine trees at the gym.
March 8, 2020
We helped a woman at Cermak who’d been locked out of her car. It took more energy than we thought it would take. I bought the wrong battery at the Walgreens. We got kumquats. I feel unsure that they will get eaten, but they seemed like such an important novelty.
April 13, 2020
Ordered Mexican food for dinner and we were working on the jigsaw puzzle. Took 2 walks & on one walk saw that someone’d planted bluebells & put up a sign that said that the flowers were there because we need them right now. Oh, & a yellow-bellied sapsucker in the tree & a nice family thought we were maybe looking at something else.
May 7, 2020
I took the dirt out of the old piano in the front yard & put in coconut liner & then little succulents. Luke made a living wreath. I planted basil, purple basil, oregano, & cilantro in the window box. We watched The Bachelor & found it surprising.
June 15, 2020
Walking south I saw a boy, his dad was kinda scolding him, the boy goes, “Dad can I ask her if I can pet her dog?” And the dad goes, “Too late.” And that was sad. Walking north the way back, I see them again! The kid asks again & this time it works out & he pets Doc.
Me: He likes you!
Dad: He can smell Ladybug on you.
Me: Is that YOUR dog?
Boy: Yes. She’s a beagle terrier mix. (Indicates to Doc.) Is she a beagle terrier mix?
July 22, 2020
During therapy, I discussed the maggots. I was sitting in the house next door. I was quite aware of an errant cat poop all the while, lying on the kitchen floor.