I wrote a daily journal for 20 years

Here’s what happened

This isn’t a success story, at least not about how I became a millionaire. I’m not a millionaire. I’m just a guy who wrote a journal for 20 years. I have done that though. That’s what this post is about.

We’ve all seen the “Change your life in 7 days” articles, or 30 days. “Change your life” they tell us. The general message seems to be the faster we can change our lives, the better. I once saw an article called “Change your life in an hour”. I remember thinking what a sad life that person must’ve had, if they could change it in an hour.

I’m sure it’s possible, to make a lot of high-impact changes. Quit your job. By a plane ticket. Download Katy Perry’s latest single. I remember the first time I did that. I knew my life was never going be the same again. From that moment on, I was always going to feel like an “old person”. At 25. Thanks Katy.

I’d like to tell you about a longer period of change.

In 1997, I started keeping a journal. I was twelve years old. I’d seen my parents getting their diaries out. Checking their schedules. Fitting in plans. What plans could I make? I was twelve. My life’s ambitions comprised worrying about what kind of jeans I was wearing and going through this new thing I’d just found out about called puberty. I wasn’t an enterprising young student but I did like to write.

If you’re imagining some mouth-watering sundae of creative wordplay, drizzled in original insight and sprinkled with vulnerability, you have not read many twelve-year-old’s journals. Sue Townsend was well over thirty when she wrote about Adrian Mole. There will be superstar kiddiewinkles out there but… here’s one of my entries: “We picked up my friend Michael at 11am. We went to play lazer tag. There were five players. This man and this girl teamed up. I came 4th.” I was probably better at lazer tag than I was at writing.

I’d love to say that by writing every day, I steadily improved, or that by recording how I spent my time, I became a master guru of productivity. Neither is at all evident from at least the first six years of my entries. I might have improved in my school work but when it came to those five to fifteen minutes or so at the end of the day, all I wanted to do was jot down what I did and who I did it with before closing my eyes.

I kept it up though.

It should be noted that there was no discipline involved. I wanted to write every single one of those entries. Some nights I was too tired, or busy or drunk, so I’d leave it and play catch-up later in the week. I wasn’t doing it to improve myself or develop a skill. To explain my motivation for logging my activity and sometimes my thoughts, I guess it came out of a need to be heard. That’s strange though as no one has ever read my journals. Ok, maybe it was because I wanted to make a mark somewhere. Again though, nobody has ever seen the mark. What I’m actually doing here is trying to guess at why I developed this habit. I just Google’d “Why do people keep journals?” but the results are overwhelmingly entitled “Why you should keep a journal”.

In his 2007 book The Black Swan, the philosopher Nassim Taleb coined the term “narrative fallacy” to describe how humans are inclined to take complex and haphazard events and weave them into convenient stories to make them more memorable and understandable. I could do that. I could say that I wrote because I was inspired by my parents, or the authors I enjoyed as a kid. That it gave me an outlet. That I had a bad memory and wanted to write everything down. That I thought my life would matter more if I documented it and just one person found the books after I died. It was probably some combination of all those things, as well as other factors beyond my awareness.

By 2005, I’d started making more of an effort. I’d buy only A4 diaries so that I had enough space to write 200 words each day. I wrote more about my feelings and the meaning behind events. I started logging things I wanted to improve, like my diet and how many miles I ran. This was like the Jurassic period. Everything was larger but still quite clunky and mechanical. It lasted for eight years.

In 2013 I started blogging. The concept had been around for years but I’d never fancied it, a) because I was already writing about my life every day and b) because my daily experiences alternated between being too boring to broadcast and too personal to publish. A few things had happened though:

• My housemate started a blog. Seeing a friend do something is usually what gets me started on any new hobby. I see them do it, I see them enjoy it and I think to myself “hey, I could do that” and I could. I got straight to work on it.
• I’d moved to the city and started dating. My life had instantly become more interesting. I didn’t write much about the dates themselves but they gave me a sense that life was worth documenting.
• I got my first smartphone. Ok so maybe I was a little late to join the party in that respect but once I got my hands on the phone, I could write posts and upload them during a single commute, meaning I’d started a whole new hobby without feeling like I was sacrificing any time.

My weekly blog instantly became a solid addition to the journals, which I still wrote by hand. I would share it on Facebook and some of my friends and family would read it, which was amazing. I knew it didn’t mean I was any good. It’s like baking a cake. If you have nice friends, they’ll still give you compliments, even if it’s dry, flavourless and sinks in the middle. I enjoyed knowing that people could see it though. More than anything else, that probably drove me to improve.

I started writing at work. Whenever a technical article needed to be written, I’d volunteer. It was a busy team and I’d always end up writing the articles in the evenings or over a weekend. I didn’t mind too much. I started writing an internal newsletter. Then another one. I loved telling people that I wrote two newsletters a month. When it came to the second, a lot of the content was sourced from colleagues but I’d invariably write a section or two.

I wrote a book.

In 2014, I’d been blogging for a year and dating for a year. Neither had been a roaring success but roaring successes don’t always happen in a year. In fact they don’t always happen in a lifetime. By this point, it should be obvious that I don’t write just because I want to get better at writing. No jokes please.

The book was a way of processing some of my experiences growing up and dating, without having to talk to anyone about it. These were personal experiences. I switched all the names, places and any other identifiers to completely unrecognisable nouns. It could be fiction. It’s approximately 80,000 words long. It took me three years to write and six months to edit. I sent it to the first publishing agent last week.

It’s 2017. I discovered Medium earlier this year and have written some articles. I’ve taken a career break and have been looking at entry-level writing roles. I’d like to take a course in copy editing. I still write in my journal every night.

I don’t call myself a writer. I’ve been called one. I’d like to work on my narrative and learn more about the process of storytelling. Get better at grammar. Read more. I don’t read enough.

I enjoy keeping a journal. Being able to flick back and recall, to myself and others, experiences we’d have forgotten about. Knowing that I’ve got the “discipline”, or whatever it is, to stick to it every day. I don’t know how much it’s changed my life. To some extent, I feel that it is my life, or at least a part of it. I feel quite good about it though, it’s not something I plan on stopping any time soon.