December posting: journalkeeping
Sun, Dec. 29th, 2013 10:56 pmFor ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hebethen: journalkeeping
I used to keep a journal as a kid, though not very often: there are entries in it from pre-Taiwan-move all the way through college, I think. It's funny flipping through it to see kid me scrawling in color pencil about how much I hate my mom or how awesome my seventh birthday party was. But because of the sparsity of the entries, it's hard to get a sense of what's going on, save for the brief periods of time in which I wrote in it several days in a row, such as when I had crushes on people in high school and etc.
I started my LJ as a kind of electronic version of that, but a big part of the draw was also the possible public-ness of it, the communication with other people. (You can tell when I started to have more friends by how much less I would introspect in my diary...) And of course, this isn't a journal per se, because I'm not doing the chronicling for myself; I'm pretty aware of writing for other people. And the number of completely locked, private entries here are incredibly rare, and most of them are actually entries that had been filtered to people originally that I eventually locked down after the fact. So I'm not really sure how good I am at traditional journal keeping; I feel like I spend too much time in my head as it is. I did find brief stints on the 750 Words site helpful for a bit when I was much more anxious, but by and large, I like writing to other people and hearing back in response, even if I have been terrible at answering comments.
The frequency of journaling with LJ/DW has also been really interesting, because I can page back through periods of my life and see things evolve, as opposed to the brief snapshots from my paper journal, and because I'm writing for other people, I try to be more descriptive and say more than I would just for myself. Of course, everything is filtered to what I am okay with other people reading, but on the other hand, since I wasn't that great at journal keeping to begin with, I think this still works best for me! The recent Daily Happiness entries (filter opt in and opt out) have also been helpful with this, since it's much more about the minutiae of my day.
hebethen: journalkeepingI used to keep a journal as a kid, though not very often: there are entries in it from pre-Taiwan-move all the way through college, I think. It's funny flipping through it to see kid me scrawling in color pencil about how much I hate my mom or how awesome my seventh birthday party was. But because of the sparsity of the entries, it's hard to get a sense of what's going on, save for the brief periods of time in which I wrote in it several days in a row, such as when I had crushes on people in high school and etc.
I started my LJ as a kind of electronic version of that, but a big part of the draw was also the possible public-ness of it, the communication with other people. (You can tell when I started to have more friends by how much less I would introspect in my diary...) And of course, this isn't a journal per se, because I'm not doing the chronicling for myself; I'm pretty aware of writing for other people. And the number of completely locked, private entries here are incredibly rare, and most of them are actually entries that had been filtered to people originally that I eventually locked down after the fact. So I'm not really sure how good I am at traditional journal keeping; I feel like I spend too much time in my head as it is. I did find brief stints on the 750 Words site helpful for a bit when I was much more anxious, but by and large, I like writing to other people and hearing back in response, even if I have been terrible at answering comments.
The frequency of journaling with LJ/DW has also been really interesting, because I can page back through periods of my life and see things evolve, as opposed to the brief snapshots from my paper journal, and because I'm writing for other people, I try to be more descriptive and say more than I would just for myself. Of course, everything is filtered to what I am okay with other people reading, but on the other hand, since I wasn't that great at journal keeping to begin with, I think this still works best for me! The recent Daily Happiness entries (filter opt in and opt out) have also been helpful with this, since it's much more about the minutiae of my day.
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