chronic diaryhoea

on keeping [too many] notebook[s]

Lazy reuse of a university essay I wrote in June. Genuinely completely lost track of what the fuck I was talking about like eight times as I reread last night but I also kind of like some parts for now…

The problem, for me, has always been remembering. I'm plagued by a fear of mentally patting my pockets, flipping through my cerebral Rolodex in a panic, and not being able to retrieve a shred or fragment of experience or sensation, no matter how banal. Seriously worrying about forgetting the citrusy perfume of a girl I once shared a desk with is, at its best, a sign of privilege. At its worst, it's just embarrassing.

The solution to this problem I devised as a pre-teen was keeping a diary. I had made several aborted attempts in the past and found it a chore, but I purchased a red Warwick exercise book and industriously opened with the witty, astute:

10/12/17

I'm not quite sure how to start this now.

Further down, on the same page, I take on a new, humiliatingly boorish tone:

I'll write whatever the hell I want, whenever the hell I want. I'll keep it to myself, but maybe when I'm rich and famous I'll publish excerpts of it for exorbitant amounts of money.

I'd at least like to remember a little bit of this time. I can hardly think of anything worse than not being able to have any memories, because without memories how do you know who you are?

It’s easy to picture myself now, the uneven fringe my grandma used to cut with kitchen scissors, hunched over and scribbling away with a Biro clutched in my sweaty paw, the word 'hell' giving me a naughty thrill.

My name is Sylvie Jane Yee, and I'm twelve years old. This is ridiculous, but I like to think of myself sometimes as a sort of tortured soul that is trapped in the confines of suburban conformism.

Oh, god. As a tortured nonconformist soul my favourite things were Taylor Swift music videos and doing BuzzFeed quizzes that told you what flavour of jelly bean you were.

Since that day, I have continued to keep a diary, obsessively, graduating from exercise books to spiral-bound notebooks to hardback German journals, and, somehow, over seven years, I've managed to say absolutely nothing of note. It's like tapping a mini-golf ball settled on the rim of the hole and it ending up in the pond. I quote, from a recent entry:

3/5/24

I just really want to run. Like, be free. Like I feel like a horse. I do eat like six apples a day.

I suspect I might have to find 'exorbitant amounts of money' from other sources.

The other problem with keeping a diary is that it allows one to be hopelessly self-indulgent, as I'm sure you can tell. As internationally famous literary icon Oscar Wilde once wrote, 'I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.' I totally get this! Unfortunately, I am not internationally famous literary icon Oscar Wilde.

Sometimes, I'll admit, I try to picture myself as a bohemian archetype, a starving artist, the type to make a Parisian café a tourist attraction or be addicted to heroin. I did this the most in high school, when my days consisted of playing online solitaire (on easy mode) in the back of English class and watching The Chase with my parents. I'm far from ungrateful for the life I have, but let's just be honest; it's extremely difficult to LARP as a Baudelaire or a Bolaño in the city of Christchurch. I suppose that with a little bit of imagination, though, Ōtautahi can be quite Parisian. For instance, we, too, have pigeons.

On the odd occasion I can stomach a re-read, I am sometimes hit with a dazzling burst of pleasure in a particular snapshot of sensation, like the dreamy astigmatic smudge of a streetlight through a rain-streaked bus window. Mostly, I want to hurl the book into a woodchipper. Reading back my diary feels like being stuck in an elevator with all my past selves, and one of us smells. It tends to follow dull, obsessive circles of thought over and over, and the pages are soaked with the Lynx Africa stink of teenage melodrama. The original mission–remembering–has utterly failed. In fact, I often feel genuine surprise at the course of events, as if I didn't live them. I suppose I didn't, really; this other iteration of me did, a stranger through the thick gauzy veils of years and experience. Usually this change makes me feel relieved, but occasionally it feels sepulchral. I'm walking up the aisle to view the body, only to be greeted upon peering over the coffin's rim with my thirteen-year-old self, still warm to the touch but eerily stiff.

Then again, I suppose the distance is exacerbated further by my being a total poser. I tend to write in my diary in a coarse, bombastic tone, like I'm trying to impress a girl with rudimentary skateboard tricks. Despite this, I almost never show anyone my journals, and in real life I'm usually quite timid. Once, my friend begged for a look, just one page, to know what it was like. I finally surrendered the notebook, ready at any time to snatch it back, worried that some sort of mental hymen would be broken were I to let anyone come in unto my scribblings. He opened it to the middle and furrowed his brow, and I waited with bated breath and pounding heart. Eventually, he looked up, curiously nonplussed, and handed it back.

"Your handwriting’s so bad. I can't even read it."

One reason behind this self-construction, I suspect, is an endless subjection to the twenty-first century panopticon of cellphones. It's so embarrassing to be so shallow. Anne Frank certainly had more to worry about than whether or not she had a double chin from that angle. I feel Sasquatchian when it comes time for photo ops, despite being as much of an amateur paparazzo as anyone. When I open Instagram, I can actively feel the brain cells atrophying. Unfortunately, I'm powerless against the hot sugary rush of the dopamine loop, and will happily scroll until my eyeballs have dried into raisins and my fingers are sore.

As a girl, especially, life externalised can turn into a spectacle, a carefully engineered stage show where one must juggle a thousand different traits and personas scriptless, blindfolded, and with the constant threat of a sandbag falling on your head. Or maybe I'm just a tryhard. Whatever the cause, I always feel like a sideline spectator, peering over my own shoulder, grading my one-man show and boxing my ears if I get too sentimental or unironically whingey. In an old diary, at some point, I must have annotated the same passages I had earlier written despondent, the ink smudged and swollen with tears. In the margin, in a different pen: CRINGE ALERT!!!

Sometimes, too, you're just annoying, and a horrible person. Sure, I have my virtues, but I also find the truth of myself petrifying. I can only ever view it indirectly, angle words on a page towards it in the absence of a mirrored shield. Of course, I've never held any sort of impression of myself as a saint. I'm awkward, selfish, bitter, will fall in love with anyone, want to shoot people who walk slowly in the mall, and my mother cries over me. I couldn't even last my three month trial period at Mexicali Fresh because I was so bad at rolling the burritos there were complaints.

Regardless, the adoption of a falser and possibly more masculine voice has become second-nature, so much so that whatever might have delineated my normal and constructed personas has collapsed and they've bled into each other, further obscuring whatever truth may or may not have been crushed underneath. The authenticity question is also inherently frustrating because the variables of identity flux are too many to count. Change is, obviously, constant and uncontrollable. In some way or another I’m already a slightly different person than when I started this paragraph. I don't believe in having a concrete, pre-ordained personality, though; I feel like life is too ridiculous. For instance, I recently read about a British man who fell into his clotheshorse at an extremely unlikely angle and suffocated. Oh my god? If fate was real, I pray it would have just a shred more regard for human dignity.

But what does that leave me with? Am I, essentially, nothing? A disappointing pass-the-parcel with no final treasure hidden under the newspaper? If I'm writing so much about myself and my life, shouldn't I at least be interesting? Are any of us? (I hope you're not under the impression that, after all these years, I still think of myself as uniquely tortured and societally stifled. I mean, I am, but only as uniquely tortured and societally stifled as everyone else). Are we natured? Are we nurtured? Are we composed of any real, essential substance, or are we just a papier-mâché shell of other people and hazy memories?

In general, too, I am the worst of unreliable narrators, slightly less disturbing than Kinbote but about the same level of abject patheticness as Caulfield. There are unenforced narrative gaps:

29/4/23

[My friend] cooked us packet tortellini… this was about 7:30… at some point I fell asleep, maybe twice actually, and then we went down to the dairy… This bit really confuses me because in theory this part of the night lasted 4 hours, but most of that is lost to me. We only got through half the movie?.. I guess I slept more net time than I thought… I got a little tipsy on the vodka… I had 4 I think…

Not to mention straight-up delusion:

8/5/24

…The crazy thing is that I was lowkey ultrastalking [the girlfriend of a person I liked] today… from a certain angle she is giving… very Sylvie Yee… sisters from another mister. Not kidding… uncanny… similar, like, head shapes…

26/5/24

I asked more people if they think she looks like me. [a]: "Um, yeah, I guess?" [b]: "Um, sort of, but not really." [c]: "No." [d]: "Not at all."

So, quite aside from whether my persona is real or not, is my very life just a construction? I am the sole historian of my experience, and I have no professional integrity in the role. I'm more of a proponent of the artistic truth, an opportunistic splice-and-dicer who will omit and embellish either consciously or not. There is no peer-review. My cited sources are one Wikipedia article and a theatrical wink.

People, sometimes, think I must be exceptionally literate or dedicated to have consistently kept a journal to the degree I have for so long. It's not like I'm not going to contradict them, but, in fact, I think my journalistic mania is a symptom of total idiocy. More than a pursuit of letters, I keep my diary like a thumb to suck. Again, always, I am afraid of it all fading–if I can play lepidopterist and capture each day to pin in my display drawer, it's a victory against the encroachment of time. Being literary, for me, would be writing about something other than dinner or not wanting to study. I am not one to discount the power of the microcosm, but my particular one is just dull, and my time in the school of experience underwhelming. I make real efforts to find and accept all novel or dubious situations open to me, but sometimes they simply turn their backs and ignore my shoulder taps.

Anyway, it's not like I can stop now. My diary has become a sort of mewling infirm aunt who needs to be spoonfed on the hour, and the compulsion to write a disease entirely of itself. I read an interview of Harold Bloom lately where he said 'I write in desperation… to keep going, to keep myself from going mad.'¹ I know how he felt, although to me the options of writing or madness seem somewhat mutually inclusive.

For me, writing is all I could ever possibly do. Not only does my identity rest on and exist through it, but I am so bad at maths that most other career paths are automatically closed to me. In the age of artificial intelligence, most of my ambition consists of not ending up begging for change in a gutter, but, on the other hand, I want to build a life of writing so badly it aches. To be a writer for a living, one doesn't have to be good (in fact, not to be awful, but I think the money lies, currently, in being talentless), but my skills at smutty romance and commercial copy make my personal writing look positively Shakespearean. Trying to build a profitable persona out of a full-time hobby of talking to myself has so far been, well, difficult. I'm so humiliatingly engrossed in my navel that all other formats and topics are of secondary importance. The farthest I've ever gotten in fiction is one or two short stories and a sprawling adolescent-era melodramatic saga about a comically dysfunctional family of eight, mostly focused on suffering (one of them, a closeted gay: another, a teen prostitute with a meth addiction).

I'm not sure what the future holds. Recently I tried to end my codependent relationship with the diary in favour of something publishable, but I went running back into its arms within the day, completely forgetting my vow of abstinence. In terms of literary fiction, I'm just, well, not that deep. My favourite movie is Pitch Perfect. Do you think Faulkner or Joyce would even be able to make it through the projectile vomit scene? My logic-based intelligence is such that I get genuinely impressed when people can do long division. To remedy this, I've been playing more chess lately for an intellectual pursuit, and I'm getting to be about as good as Fischer! If Fischer was really bad.

Alas; as well as being lowbrow, waffley, and self-obsessed, I am stubborn. There is no situation where I see myself putting the pen down other than both my hands being amputated. I will gladly keep playing my tiny violin as the ship breaks in two, squawk under the blanket thrown over my cage, crawl Shawshank-style through the river of shit until I can tear my shirt off and rejoice in a Biblical rain. Rolodex overstuffed and disorganised, output pathetic, mental audience booing, ears being boxed, for better or for worse, I will never be stopped.

To engage is language, in whatever form, at whatever level of quality, is to live, or, at the very least, to attempt to ascribe meaning to the act. I'm frankly not enough of an intellectual to enjoy or accept the idea of a meaningless life. Instead, writing is the altar I kneel at, no matter how base or profane my observance, no matter how primitively wrought my idols, and I'm nothing short of a mindless fanatic. The Kool-Aid is sweet, and the sheepfold open to the most wayward of lambs. It's always enough.

1. Bloom, Harold. Interview with Antonio Weiss. The Paris Review, issue 18, 1991, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-1-harold-bloom.