A year on Substack and a new collection of journals
an overview of my current personal journalling practices
It’s been almost a year since I created this Substack, with my first post published on the 27th of April, 2023. It’s been a year, in the sense that I’ve gone through some major life stage changes, had some health struggles, and was diagnosed with a chronic illness that threatened to turn everything upside down. But I can happily report that I not only survived, I managed to make some happy memories along the way. Making those happy memories is, for me, more than just doing stuff: going to concerts, galleries, parks, and the like. The actual activities are the practical foundation, but for me, as a creative kind of person, the full arc of making the memory incorporates an intuitive and multidisciplinary approach of photography, visual arts, journalling, and mindfulness.
My personal experience is that I find great value in synthesizing my real-life outings and activities by utilizing them as a springboard for creativity. My approximately monthly blog posts are also important. Even if no one else reads my Substack, I find value in drawing together the different threads of these experiences - and the internal emotional and intellectual responses they generate – by collating these ideas in essay form. I believe that this has been a valuable experience, to share my humble little diary posts, photos, and other creative output. Perhaps it’s my own version of an ‘immortality project.’ Uncomfortably aware of the speed at which my mortal life is progressing, I weave my own little threads of words and art in an attempt to form a virtual tapestry from my ‘one wild and precious life.’ (1)
I see this Substack as an amalgamation of edited highlights from my personal handwritten long-form journals and my photography. As I mentioned in my previous post (‘Mid-autumn 2024 diary’), in order to fully absorb the myriad different activities I’ve undertaken in recent months, I’ve spent considerable time journalling through them. I don’t like leaping from one activity to the next if it results in these activities blurring together. I would hate for this new level of energy, activity and opportunity I have in this new life stage to result in taking things for granted. (A topic that I also touched on in a post about my holiday to the rural Victorian tourist town Bright in April 2023.) I don’t ever want to become the kind of person that talks through an expensive event because privilege means that going to these events is just another thing to do, no more exciting than a café outing or walk around the block directing some passive-aggressive side eye to the people just behind us at Riverdance’s Melbourne show in early April 2024; I marvel that there are people who can afford to spend several hundred dollars on tickets for a show they will barely watch because they spend half the time talking loudly.
Recently, in addition to my various creative practices, I’ve added two new journal projects to the two I already maintain. I now have four separate notebooks, intended for specific purposes.
The old journals: long-form personal reflective writing and my handwritten reading records
Long-form personal journal
Handwritten journalling is something I’ve practiced for most of my adult life. It’s changed and evolved, and at various times there have been prolonged breaks. Sometimes it was in the form of a cognitive behavioural therapy diary to share with my clinical psychologist. Or it was a notebook for copying important Scriptures during church sermons, in my past-era as a Pentecostal church member. The oldest journal I still have with me dates back to my late teen years, when I was a new university student and exploring pagan spiritual practices, while grappling with the personal shock that I was romantically falling for my Christian housemate (who is now my husband!). That was when I was younger than my own children are now. Some journals have long since been shredded, as they represent the worst of my battles with depression and other mental health struggles.
While I’ve gone through sporadic phases of regular journalling, my current regular journalling practice is my most consistent. I began this practice in July 2018, writing at least once per week since then. I am now up to my 43rd journal notebook in that series, a beautiful dot grid A5 hardback black-and-grey design with gold foil embossed moon and stars patterning from The Quirky Cup Collective. This notebook is the free-for-all space where I work out my dramatic brain, especially in the context of my ongoing mental health and chronic illness journeys; but it’s also where I practice descriptive observational writing. In my university undergrad days, my Minor was in journalism - this journal is literally where I try to practice the journalism skills I learned back then.
I especially like writing about weather patterns, birds, and what’s happening in my garden, as well as collecting anecdotes about daily life and recording my experience of things like concerts and festivals. Every single entry records the date, location of writing, current temperature, sunrise/sunset times, moonphase, and music I’m listening to at the time. Over the years this level of detail has revealed to me a link between the seasons and my moods.
It’s amazing how recording the seemingly mundane stuff of daily life can mean so much in subsequent years: for example, writing about seeing butterflies among the bulrushes while walking the kids to school along the creek trail, which was a whole decade ago now.
I especially like my “Plague Diaries,” the journals I recorded during the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020-2021. ‘Like’ in the sense that I’m glad I wrote them, even if most of it is a descriptive catalogue of the sky as seen from my bedroom; it was actually a horrifically difficult time in my life, as it was for so many. But my journal helped me track the passing of time in a very strange timeless kind of era.
Book reading records
Since 2017 I have also kept a comprehensive, detailed reference list of every single book that I finished reading. At first it was simply a list that I kept on a sheet of paper, stuck to the side of the filing cabinet, but in 2018 I transferred all of the books into a single reading record. This record lists every finished book in chronological order of completion, with a full set of Harvard-style referencing information, tallies of genres, and short reviews for some books. By the end of 2023 I had filled that notebook, so this year I started a new reading record.
Between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2023 I read a total of 361 books. In some of those years I reached my annual goal of 52 books; other years I barely reached a total of 30.
Since 1 January 2024, I’ve finished 26 books, and am halfway to my annual goal, with most of the year remaining. There are many different online systems for recording the books one reads, but for me a handwritten journal works best. It’s more in the spirit of my original intention for bothering to track my reading habits, back when I first decided to do so in late 2016: that is, to get offline and back into the real world.
The new journals: a commonplace book and a personal book of proverbs
Commonplace book
This is a new project for me, though I have done similar things in the past. As a teenager, I spent many happy hours in the school library, copying out interesting facts from the reference books there. It’s the very reason that nowadays I can still quote, from memory, random general knowledge about specific topics, such as dinosaurs, or horses, or Gothic and punk subcultures. I kept refillable display folders full of drawings I had made using photos in animal encyclopedias, annotated with the animals’ various Linnaean classification. And I had scrapbooks of newspaper and magazine clippings about horses, favourite musicians, and, at one point, Formula One, when it came to Melbourne. (A kind of heresy for a rural Australian kid, who was supposed to only be interested in the V8 supercars, and not this European open-wheel racing!)
Nowadays, with the internet providing instant answers to questions, and Pinterest and similar sites great for collating reference images for drawing, I lost the habit of copying information. But in late March this year I stumbled across some videos on YouTube about the concept of a “Commonplace Book” and was very inspired to try it for myself. I appreciate that I’m several centuries late to the party, but I’m excited to try this out.
I’ve watched several creators from a variety of cultural and educational backgrounds share how they use the commonplace book concept, but the overall gist is the same: collecting the things you’re learning in a single dedicated notebook. Some people parse them out to meet a variety of different academic disciplines and categories, but simpler is better for me. Therefore, I’ll just be using the one book, a bright yellow Leuchtturm 1917 dot grid book. If I find it useful, then I’ll continue the series. Thus far I’ve used it to write a brief set of intentions for my commonplace book practice, in the historical context of commonplacing, and collated some new vocabulary and phrases that I learned in Ukrainian DuoLingo.
I was very inspired by the idea of using commonplacing as a formal practice for dialoguing with ideas – both in collecting ideas and composing responses to them. I miss the whole university learning process and have been looking for ways to exercise those skills and keep my neuroplasticity functioning (even though it’s been over a decade since I graduated). Part of this has included taking online courses. Dr Sharon Blackie’s online courses about Celtic history and mythology are my current in-progress field of study. But I also have a few Domestika art courses on the go. Not to mention my ongoing daily DuoLingo practice (mostly Ukrainian and Finnish languages), which I hope to expand just a little. I’ll probably never use the languages I’m learning, but they’re good for keeping the brain active.
Lately I’ve been a bit overwhelmed trying to track where I was keeping my various notes and ideas. I also like to read nonfiction books on topics like history, sociology, literature, politics, Indigenous knowledge, and science. I often find that I want to take notes, but copying them out onto my phone notes app was proving to be a trap. I’d read a page, go to take a note, and then 2 hours later wonder why I was doomscrolling Instagram. Again.
What I want is a way to contain all these new things I am learning, instead of starting a new notebook for each new course or topic or book notes. Not to mention how wasteful it is buying a whole new notebook for every single course, with all those accusing blank pages left over by the end. Redolent with potential but left empty like a mirror of the soul’s void that contains nothing but the eternally reverberating screams of the trees that died to make that paper. I think the commonplace book concept meets those requirements. And it has a lot of room for expansion and refinement as I determine what works for my personal learning style.
The commonplace book is an idea that stretches back into past millennia, though as far as I can work out the modern version of it dates to the 17th Century philosopher John Locke. It’s a way to collate and engage with new ideas that inspire one’s interest. I really, really love this idea, and have been watching and reading YouTube videos on the theme to see how other people use this concept to help them arrange their ideas.
The commonplace book reminds me of Emma and Harriet’s riddles and quotes book in the 1816 novel Emma by Jane Austen, which is one of my favourite novels. In that story, in the pre-social media dark ages of the late 18th Century, Emma and Harriet amuse themselves by asking friends to share interesting quotes and riddles in their book. In the story this results in some funny and plot-altering miscommunications when they misinterpret the vicar Mr Elton’s riddle writing as a veiled marriage proposal to Harriet. I don’t expect my own commonplace journal to result in such things, of course. But I think it’s a testament to this historical notion of a big notebook for condensing and collecting ideas.
I like learning new things and find I retain information far better by handwriting it. My experience of typing information is that it seems to bypass my long term memory; if I handwrite it, it tends to stick in my brain.
Personal proverbs
I also have a new A6 dotted reporter’s notebook, also a Leuchtturm 1917, which I will use as a kind of personal proverbs collection. The idea is to take concise quotes (and that can include from poetry and novels and any wise saying) and create a pocket collection of wisdom to be revised. The idea is that it also doubles as a digital detox practice; there is no need to doom scroll when you can pocket-notebook-full-of-proverbs-scroll. I am trying to decide what quote to begin mine with, to set the tone for what I’m trying to achieve - though it will probably be a Thomas Merton line or perhaps something from Tolkien.
One benefit of handwriting, memorizing and dialoguing with interesting facts and quotes, is that by filling my mind with information that sparks my curiosity, I notice that my anxiety levels have declined. Now, it hasn’t magically healed my mental health struggles. I certainly won’t be telling my psychologist that I don’t need her assistance anymore, now that I’ve started commonplacing. But just on a day-to-day coping level, the intentional practice of learning things away from the internet has been incredibly beneficial for my sense of calm. It’s hard to get caught in a loop of ruminating doom-thinking and doom-scrolling when I’m carefully copying out a quote from a physical nonfiction book I’ve borrowed from the library, using a nice new writing pen, in my fancy yellow Leuchtturm journal.
I am curious to see if I continue these practices, or if I give up and roll them all back into my long-form journal. But right now, as the days grow shorter and the seasonal affective disorder months approach rapidly, anything I can do to keep my mind happy and active can only be a good thing.
References
(1) ‘Poem 133: The Summer Day,’ by Mary Oliver, 1992. Source: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/ (accessed 4 April 2024).
Very interesting read!