Well - not really. There’s an app called Drafts that’s remarkably useful for taking notes, and I’ve started to fill it up with more personal things. It’s weird. Over the last few years, the more personal posts I’ve made have been a sort of moderated, watered-down, abstract version of events that largely attempts to avoid offence. With a diary - or unfiltered thoughts, or quick drafts, or whatever you want to call them - there’s no need to do that. And… hm. I think I know why I’m doing it.
I spend a lot of time thinking about other people. I don’t mean this as some grand selfless comment - you can have bad thoughts about others as well as good - but more that this sort of approach can mean that your identity slowly gets erased. Combine this with the fact that I’m 22 - the sort of age that doesn’t exactly lend itself to strong self-definition - and that I’m gearing up to abandon this life in favour of a remarkably different one, and it can often feel like there isn’t really much here. This has a few side effects.
One: people tend to like me a little more. Most people have this kind of latent solipsism going on, where they’re more interested in talking about their own lives than listening to and absorbing the lives of others. Maybe it’s because I associate self-centredness with some of the most traumatic events of my life, maybe it’s for some other reason that I don’t quite understand, but I tend to be the opposite - I’m interested in other people, and other people tend to appreciate the opportunity to talk to someone who seems fairly faceless. I can become this sort of quasi-therapist without really realising it.
Two: I have some really shattering low points. Not really knowing who you are can fuck with you. I don’t claim to be alone on this one, though the fact that I prioritise the thoughts and feelings of others over my own means that any progress towards becoming something recognisable is a little halting, a little slow, and occasionally stuck in reverse.
Three: I get stuck in the present a little more. This one was a surprise to think about, simply because I used to be obsessed with my past. There’s still part of me that is, but it feels like it’s a little harder to draw lessons from it. Current, lived experience is so visceral that it’s easy to forget how you felt three, five, ten years ago.
So… I’m essentially talking to myself again. I kept a diary for four years alongside my ill-advised LiveJournal (now purged, and thank goodness), and then sort of stopped when I started a blog. Part of this was because the three and a half years between relationships were years where I was more or less alone - I might keep my focus external now, but a couple of years ago I might as well have been a brain in a vat, and that meant that I could be a little harsher, and a little more raw in what I was writing. That’s petered out, though. I’d never claim that I wasn’t being genuine online - it’s something that I pride myself on - but anything that I write these days has more of an editorial sheen. You’re not quite getting any direct link to what’s going on in my brain if I think it targets someone who’s likely to read this. I’ve found somewhere else to grasp a little freedom to think, and it’s doing me a lot of good.