Dear Dissertation Diary: On Keeping a Diary

I was never good at keeping a diary. 

I always thought that diary-writing was a romantic hobby that required pristine notebooks and delicate pens. That I would have to pour out my soul by candlelight and weave an intricate narrative of my tumultuous life. I had many pretty notebooks and prettier pens but they never lasted very long. The frustrations of messy writing and inconsistent formatting always made me lose interest and I could never keep a proper journal for more than a few days. Aesthetics aside, the usual diaries tended to remind me of all the ways that my life was uninteresting and unworthy of writing down and I never had anything salacious or exciting or witty enough to commit to paper. 

When I entered grad school I realized that I hated writing but I was too committed to the bit to back out so I had to find a way to force myself to enjoy - or at the very least tolerate - a consistent writing routine. I had already started storing some of my course notes in a word processor so I decided to just type out some nightly thoughts into a diary in the same place where I did any other kind of writing. 

For the last four or so years (essentially since the first year of my Ph.D. program), I've kept a diary in Microsoft OneNote which is probably the least romantic place to write anything. I think that the pure utilitarianism of the program creates a kind of freedom for my writing that tactile notebooks just couldn't provide. In a word processor, the font never changes and the ink never dries out and the spelling mistakes can be effortlessly corrected. You can go back and add more detail and you can copy and paste your writing somewhere else if you want it to live on in some other piece of writing. I spend all my time on the computer anyway so it was always easier to enact a new digital habit than take up a new form altogether. Typing away on a keyboard is a mundane action for a student and rather than take on the pressure of an artisanal craft I could write out my thoughts right alongside the general refuse of the day with no real sense that I was doing anything special. 

I'm still rarely able to stick to a consistent diary routine, though I usually write for half an hour each morning before the real work begins. The writing itself is usually less like a narrated diary and more like a frustrated rant about the days' tasks intermingled with a grocery list and an ill-conceived scheme to make myself more productive. Sometimes it's a good place for storytelling, but I mostly use the diary to express unpleasant emotions in private so they never come out in public. It's a daily exorcism of whatever I need to whine about so I can clear my head for whatever real work needs to be done. 

While I don't think that a diary is a substitute for therapy (not that I've ever been to therapy), I do think that it's facilitated some positive emotional growth - or at least documented the process of growing up no matter what caused it to occur. My old entries are devastatingly sour and unhappy and I think that I probably went through about two solid years of depression from the fall of 2018 to the fall of 2020. I'm still a depressive person in general but I've finally learned how to actually do the tasks that are causing me stress rather than whine about them until they go away. This is mostly just embarrassing to behold but sometimes I'm grateful that I wrote it all down. I often feel that I'm behind in life or failing to progress and there can be something comforting about knowing that I can at least say that I'm better than I was two or three years ago. 

I do occasionally go back and follow up on my old routines and past predictions about the future. In the early days of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time reflecting on the ways that the lockdown was impacting my life but by now the novelty's worn off and the pandemic rarely catches my attention. I have paragraphs upon paragraphs of my 2020 life spent dreaming of the freedom a vaccine could bring and now my 2022 self can add a cynical note about my booster shot and the latest super variant of COVID-19. 

Of course, as much as the digital diary is more convenient for me than a paper notebook, there's still a looming risk that it could all disappear. My university pays for the Microsoft Suite and I don't know if there's any real way to archive the diaries onto a hard drive or print them out to have in hard copy. I'm not even sure if I want to keep them and risk them being seen by another human being or if I should just let them go as the ephemera of my life. 

I decided to put a little bit of my diary writing here so that it might be a bit better preserved. That I can keep a more polished version in a space that my school doesn't technically own and that might last a little longer. I set out to write in a journal to cure my writing anxiety and while that's mostly faded away my fear of publishing has persisted. I'd like to try and share a little bit of my life as a grad student - as guarded and performative as this kind of writing will be - in the hopes that I can start to become a little more confident about expressing myself to others.