Should I Be Journaling More or Less? On Memory and Potentially Lying to Yourself

From 2013 to 2019, I journaled obsessively. I have about a dozen journals from a dozen years (if not more) and I'm immensely grateful for the sheer amount of notes I retain. I have ventured back into journals for specifics to use for books (and keep a phone note of "human details" I'd like to observe and steal for characters.

In the moment, journaling can be helpful to stay in the moment, chart the future, track your mood (and provide some helpful hindsight bias when you go back to read it later.) That sense of, "I couldn't see it then but can see it now."

But it can also get you stuck. You might only choose to journal when you're in a venting mood, or fixating on something. You might not have enough detail to really be helpful. So what is it for? When is it worth being entirely transparent in a journal? When is your journal only capturing one side of your personality?

In 2020 or so, I read a book that ruined journaling for me (see below) and also decided I needed to be way more external as a person. It was no longer helpful for me to journal.

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But now, in 2024, I am a little bummed that I don't have enough ephemera or record from ages 22 to 26. I would love to have some more from my early 20s, and want to make sure I'm not neglecting my documentation—plus, journaling can often help me ground myself in the current moment as a form of meditation.

This Book About False Memory Killed the Habit for Me

The main aspect that killed journaling for me in my early 20s, beyond time and exhaustion from also writing a book four-plus separate times and a dozen articles at a time, was that I read this book about the flaws in memory that completely ruined the experience for me by making me terrified that I was writing myself into misremembering my entire life.

Book: The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory by Dr. Julia Shaw
Release Date: August 1, 2017
Publisher: Random House
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought

Memories make us who we are--yet the truth is they are far from being the accurate record we like to think they are. We can all admit to occasional memory lapses, but what if we have the potential for more profound errors of memory, even verging on outright fabrication and self-deception? Forensic psychologist and memory expert Dr. Julia Shaw uses the latest research to show the astonishing variety of ways in which our brains can be led astray. She shows why we can misappropriate other people's memories, believing them to be our own. She explains how police officers can imprison an innocent man for life on the basis of 300 denials and just one confession. She demonstrates the way radically false memories can be deliberately implanted, leading people to believe that they brutally murdered a loved one, or were abducted by aliens. And she reveals how, in spite of all this, we can improve our memory through awareness of its fallibility.

This book is one of the most formative books I've ever read in that it completely changed the way I think and flipped me upside down. I put it down and felt fundamentally different. For that reason, I give readers the warning: it's worth the knowledge, but tread carefully. It will fuck you up, especially if you've always felt reasonably confident in your perception of your life (or have the same worries I do about nostalgia.)

The bottom line? We are so much worse at remembering everything than we think. We are suggestible and irrational, and we change a memory pretty much every time we recall it by imprinting new ideas onto it with each pull. Which means that if you're often going over your favorite moments, you might be changing them and misremembering them.

Dr. Julia Shaw is most frequently used as an expert debunking eyewitness testimony, which has been proven to be enormously unreliable. It's a destabilizing read. For example, when you're writing a report of something, the very language and details you choose have a tendency to solidify the events in your head through that lens. So it's no longer a raw, potentially accurate memory. It's a narrative you've created, regardless of how true to reality it is.

Of course, everyone's perception is different from the get-go. But that idea absolutely terrified me away from journaling for several years. I didn't want to write down my happiest memories in case I diluted them. I didn't want to write down my bad days in case I deluded myself in some way or the transfer to paper made me not see the events clearly.

It's an unpleasant read, in some ways.

After reading this, I went down a rabbit hole about unconscious influences in the pursuit of mental clarity. Surely, if I can just reject and push past as many cognitive biases as possible, I'll be clear-headed.

The Temptation to Make Everything a Narrative

I know I'm a romantic. I'm an optimist. I have a defined moral compass that leads me through all of my actions. But does that mean I'm deluding myself, or being closed-minded by not being more open to the idea of everything being random, uncontrolled, unfixable?

I'm not sure I'll ever get away from this as a writer. Is it not a natural instinct to arrange everything into a coherent narrative? Is some of my blindness due to seeing things as they should be (antithetical to the idea of Stoicism, which tells you to reject as they should be) because of what I've picked up from stories? By making things make sense, shoving things together when they don't, but disregarding the many variables out of my control?

In The Long Goodbye, a grief memoir I love, the writer Meghan O'Rourke says she has this belief that she can genuinely fix anything by trying hard enough, and that's my fatal flaw too. I really believe I can do absolutely anything, but I don't always recognize the impossible.

“One of the ideas I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss…I also held the delusion that the imperfect could be fixed by attention.”

I do hold the belief that caring is enough to make something work out. It's one of the reasons I'm most afraid for my book to go on submission too. Just because I've spent many years in pursuit of a singular goal doesn't mean that it will work, and all I can do is prepare myself to handle it either way. We'd like to think grit is enough.

If my life were a book I were writing, sure. I'd delve into Dark Night of the Soul and know that the Climax then Resolution were right on their way (plot points from the famous Save the Cat structure.) Everyone I've encountered would remain part of the cast.

But that's not how life works. It's bumpier. And sometimes, the narrative is just naïve. The hedonic treadmill rests for no one. Gratitude, resilience, and discipline are the only stabilizers to keep your head on straight.

“The hedonic treadmill is the idea that an individual's level of happiness, after rising or falling in response to positive or negative life events, ultimately tends to move back toward where it was prior to these experiences.”

So does the temptation to fit my life into something resonant and meaningful—to extract lessons and apply philosophies and all in all "figure out" what it's supposed to look like—does that mean I'm only pulling the wool over my eyes and not seeing things for how they are? How do you fix your entire worldview if so? Does introspection help or hurt?

What's a Healthy Amount of Documentation?

One of my biggest fears is losing memories and the past. I'm a packrat for nostalgia. I hold onto letters, scraps, photos, texts. I pitch my book as focused on "corrupted nostalgia" and how to constantly reconcile your view of the past—what to have faith in and what to let go of.

From my 20s, I have practically no photos of myself. My twin sister and I have talked about it. We have photos of things and places and others, but generally get so awkward about the perceived narcissism of constant self-documentation that we actually never ask anyone else to take a solo shot or to document us. (Plus, Hannah is a very talented portrait and candid photographer, while I focus more on travel aesthetics; we are usually the ones behind a camera.)

In college, I did, but we normally had very specific events in which people were constantly rearranging to get photos with each other; the photo-taking was built into the event itself. We also have very few photos together.

In February, for example, I dyed my hair for the first time because I craved a change. I'm blonde-ish now, and have no photos that reflect my newer appearance. Any photo of me online is probably from 2019 or 2020 and thus out of date. We have both resolved to be better about this, even if we "don't like how we look" when someone initially takes the photo.

Obligatory product reviewer rec: I started toting around the CampSnap, a small, durable camera marketed as a disposable alternative, on nights out. The quality's poor, but it's tough enough to be fine through spills, bumps, and scrapes, so it feels natural to take more photos "in the moment" than with my phone or my fancier, work camera. So that has helped me at least capture some more memories.

I Went Back to Journaling This Year

Sometimes as a person, I get too bogged down in details. I have a harder time zooming out, and the temptation to hash out everything possible on the page may be a detriment to my specific personality type.

I also have no journals up until this fall. I have one journal that spans maybe three years of my 20s, and it's mostly made up of lists and daydreams of where I'd like to live, at any given time when I was deciding between cities. Frankly, I got a lot of journaling done in college simply because I journaled in some classes that I really, really didn't need to pay attention to. My brain works best longhand.

In September, I made a concentrated effort to start journaling the daily rhythms of my life again. I wanted to remember my routines and what a "day in my life" felt like. I wanted to capture certain new experiences. I finished an entire journal within a month, and am glad I have recollections from my first big trip to Europe.

But now—I don't want to journal about how I feel when it's bad because I don't want to ruminate or get stuck in it. Sometimes, I think fixating can be super unhelpful and obsessive, especially for me. I don't only want to talk about my desires for the future, because when I go back and reread the journals someday, I want to know what I was doing now, but I don't want to write to convince myself of anything.

It Kills Me That My Journaling Can Never Be Accurate

Language is never objective. Journaling and narrative is never objective. Everything from the words you use to the details you choose to share versus leave out, and even your audience have an impact. (I explain this a lot in journalism; I have a consistent voice, but shift a lot depending on which publication—and therefore audience—I'm writing for, so every piece feels different.)

I'd also say that in the present moment, it does feel risky to say anything definitive ever. As a culture, we've sort of erased the ability to let people change their minds over time. So if you've printed anything with a statement you now disagree with—or that people misinterpret—good luck.

In some ways, documentation can determine what you see as changeable versus fixed, even if your intention is just to capture the current moment and not call it immoveable—because of the way language and memory interact with that process. All of writing is literally just argument.

So how, as a writer, do you try to stay present and aware?

What is my journaling for? What am I doing?

Is it for current catharsis or future reflection? I don't even always know who I'm writing for as an audience. If I write something iffy, I apologize to the reader. Should I write less? Write more objectively? Write only what I do and not what I feel?

The Sketchbook Solution

When I was in college, I was a studio art minor. In the nature drawing class I took in spring 2019, we each undertook a sketchbook page a day. One day's work might be a sketch of a fish during a lecture; another would be a memory from our hike. I was a big fan of doing a sensory lexicon i.e. detailing the specifics of the scent / taste / look / feel / sound of every distinctive moment.

I've used that strategy in making each of my scenes feel distinctive in my book (since I care most about a vivid sense of place) and mentally as a form of meditation and to understand how different each day can be when feeling stagnant.

When I worried in 2020 that I was too interior and in my head, I loved that externalizing these sorts of details allowed me to still remember what I'd done and reflect back on it without degrading the memory by capturing how I felt about it in something as imperfect as words.

Inventory from Fall 2023

That was my solution then for addressing the pesky The Memory Illusion-inspired crisis of recollection. Since I wasn't crystallizing the memory, it would perhaps remain stronger in my mind even if it wasn't laid out verbally. I also make a ton of gratitude lists to remember the good, and that's a habit I've had for years.

I've tried going back to that to a certain extent, but do find it frustrating that I'm just no longer as capable of an artist. I need to rebuild the muscle memory before I'm at the same level, and make sure to keep up with the habit so that my sketchbooks are up to my standards. I have some from the fall but...they're ugly to me. So, that'll be my next challenge. (I have the same issue with my dancing, so need to get back into a studio.)

I truly don't know. Time will tell what the answer is, and I'm sure to make a lot of mistakes in figuring out my proper balance. Your answer to this might also be "Grace, you're thinking way too much," which: fair. And that, my friends, is why my personal theory on the key to happiness is sensory variation and gratitude for external experience—but that's another post.

At the end of the day, who you are is what you do, not how you preserve it. Right?