Every day, I write in my journal, with a fountain pen, in cursive. I start by writing the date, and then I stare at the page and try to remember what I did the day before, because the intervention of sleep is a marvelous eraser. I suspect dreams are partly the culprit; they seem so vivid upon awakening (the outhouse in which strangers were hanging their wet clothes, the broken pipe spewing water from somewhere, my husband still alive and wandering around, having given me a present I didn’t ask for, once again) that they obliterate my recollection of reality, and then they too fade. Sometimes I write down my dreams, and when I review my journal I am surprised that I don’t remember them at all; they seemed so important at the time.

Yes, I do review my journal. When it is full up and when I have started a new one, I go through and draw a line next to passages I want to type into my master document for the year. That document (one per year, one of many) comes in very handy as a way to outsource my recollection of events. If I want to know the year something happened (piercings, biopsies, trips, resignations, and so on) I can just do a computer search on that term and presto! I know what happened.

Otherwise I don’t remember much about my life, and what I do remember tends to be inaccurate. This is true of most people, I understand.

After I have transcribed what I want to keep, I tear the pages out of the composition book, put them in the recycling bin, and throw out the cover. I used to keep the filled books as a kind of trophy, the way people display their vast personal libraries and fetishize books, but there isn’t anyone I want to show off to and they took up a lot of space. Also, I realized, though it’s tempting to, say, donate my journals to some archival project, nobody else actually needs an “archive of me.” I went through my mother’s sermons a couple of years after she died, and it was a slog.

(In the same vein, before I closed my accounts, I deleted everything I ever wrote on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and various other social media sites. It took a long time, because those services cling to data like my cat clings to his mouse toy. And on Mastodon, I set my account to delete after a week.)

I am reflecting on the process today because I just finished reviewing my most recent journal, and I noticed that most of what I wrote down in November and December was about routine. In late fall and early winter, my life appears to be an attempt to maintain, to complete tasks, to tick boxes, all the while I am being afflicted by the encroaching darkness. It was November and December, and so a lot of my writing was just plodding, dutiful reflection, designed to get me upright and facing forward.

Oh, a few things sort of happened. My family celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas, though as always both were low-key events, because we don’t fuss. I took a couple of classes, and signed up to take them again starting in February. I went to visit my husband’s grave. I spent time with my adult child and with my grandson. Otherwise, I rearranged my furniture, put battery-operated candles around my house to lift my mood, and wore heavy sweaters in the house. I took walks. I completed my daily routine, over and over and over again, which means among other things that I completed a draft of a novel and wrote a blog post every day. It was very quiet. The only unusual thing was that I traveled to New York City, stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights, and saw a show.

The rest of my journal entries have to do with other people, though, and on re-reading their lives seemed tumultuous. You see, I have a number of people who call me. My friends are dealing with fear of death, sadness at childhood neglect, bitter fury at family members, bereavement, feelings of being ostracized, dismay when they do the wrong thing, work conflicts, medical complications, gratitude for small things, fear of isolation, yearning for romance, the prospect of having to take care of other people, and politics.

I’ll have to take that for granted, though, because I rarely save anything from other people’s lives in my archive. They will have to remember what they did, themselves.