I’ve had a phrase wandering in and out of my head this year: the documented life. I spent a lot of time in the spring going back through diaries and journals and online spaces locked and unlocked, pseudonymous and otherwise, updates for friends and rambling for myself alone, looking for clues about new (but familiar) exciting (but daunting) developments in my head. There were more of them than I’d remembered. It seemed that over and over again I’d sidled up to these thoughts, and written them down, and shied away again, and forgotten.
If I didn’t write it down, I start to wonder, how can I know who I was?
Then I wrote more, trying to work through the new developments. I forced my realisations into fiction, and rewrote whole sections that suddenly didn’t seem true any more. In my own private writing, I risked more honesty than I remember managing in times past, finding it suddenly important to know what was going on, and what was really going on.
(It wasn’t just text. There were delicate conversations around pints of beer and tears over gelato. But a lot of it was text. Often I think I let people see more of myself in text. Often I think it’s easier to control what people do see.)
In May I started writing in this spiral-bound notebook, trying to collect all my thoughts on one particular subject all in one place. It has worked to a certain extent, though I keep having to retrace my steps across the internet and copy paragraphs, whole entries, sometimes, into an Evernote document. But most of what I have written since on this one particular subject is in this little blue book with the gold spots.
Kathleen Jowitt 