diary
I own the journal. The good pens. The application with the annual subscription I selected specifically because paying for the whole year felt more committed. The candle for ‘setting the mood.’ The tarot deck. The second, prettier journal I acquired when the first began to feel too solemn, too accusatory, too thoroughly full of January.
What I do not own is a single completed week of any of it. I have assembled, at considerable and ongoing expense, the entire stage set for a life I keep neglecting, or perhaps quietly declining, to actually perform.
I have begun to suspect the buying is not a failed approach to the life but a substitute for it: a small, clean dose of the feeling without the indignity of the doing. The acquisition IS the procrastination, attired in productivity’s coat and its persuasive perfume.
Because the object preserves the fantasy intact. The unopened journal could still become anything; the moment I write badly in it, the possibility collapses into a real and disappointing thing. It is safer, and cheaper to the ego, to keep purchasing the potential than to hazard spending it.
We are working on it, all the same. I say this with total sincerity and no supporting evidence whatever. I have, in fact, bought a planner about it, a handsome one, with a ribbon. I can perceive the entire mechanism now, clearly, from within. I shall journal about it. Eventually. I have the perfect notebook.
the diary lives on a site with a moon phase, a daily oracle and a shelf of things reviewed with feeling.
visit the full site