- My (re?)discovery of journalling – and how I reclaimed it from instrumentation.
- Good intentions – or, when other people think they know your condition better than you, but they mean well.
EDIT 28/12/2023: Updated this post with a link to Google Trends showing an increase in searches for the term ‘manifesting’ during the summer of 2020. This part of the post refers back to a previous post about Christy Harrison’s book, The Wellness Trap:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/10/that-old-back-catalogue-part-ii-anti-diet-and-the-wellness-trap/
I bring this up because I started journalling around the same time as this trend was gathering steam. A correlation if ever there was one.
Besides this blog and my Zettelkasten, I’ve been keeping a journal regularly for nearly two years. It’s my guerilla writing tool, planner, keeper of quotes and sayings, things I’ve got on the go, etc.. This year, I swapped to a loose version of Ryder Carrol’s bullet journal method – I set up the structure of the thing, use symbols for different tasks, index notable thoughts, but other than that I’ve built the rest of my bujo’s structure from the bottom up.
I started journalling during the first COVID lockdown. I was in a bad spot in a lot of areas – mainly Uni grades, Smash performance, and mental health – and I thought a journal as a physical creative outlet was something I was missing. I followed some guy on YouTube who developed a method of splitting one journal into different sections, covering several elements of life in the one place.
Of course, when you follow ‘some guy on YouTube,’ you’re not just following some guy – the sorting algorithms for recommendation and monetisation shape the content you see. Tom Nicholas recently summarised this in a video where he explores a new phenomenon on the platform. YouTubers, he’s noticed, have taken to holding microphones:
This is some wordly wizardry that I wish I possessed at the time I wrote about hard-surface 3D modelling tutorials on YouTube:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/10/the-nurbs-are-back/
My point is, ‘some guy’ wasn’t sharing his journalling method on YouTube because he journalled for the sake of journalling itself. No, ‘some guy’ had a story to sell. He claimed that in developing his method, he went from living in his mother’s basement, to earning six figures, owning a house, a car, and if you buy his course/coaching program, you too could be well on your way to living and being the highest version of yourself – a “You v2,” if you will.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be paid for your work on YouTube through mediums where Google is not a primary intermediary. For most videomakers on YouTube who try to ‘make it,’ their boss is a Kafkaesque black box of an algorithm that hammers down on dissent; workers have invented what is essentially a new dialect of English and a genre of editing techniques to get around topics the boss doesn’t like. Vadar this fortuni article from The Conversation on ‘Algospeak:’
Likewise, there’s clearly some qualitative difference in value between the sort of videos produced by videomakers like Nicholas, and content put out by all the ‘some guy’s and gals. Seldom, if ever, do these videos leave me not reflecting about the material conditions we’re living through – Nicholas’s videos, by contrast, actually get me to think.
This other creator, meanwhile, was an expert practitioner of criti-hype before we had a word for criti-hype. You know the sort of thing – playing up shite like the Law of Attraction, vibrational frequencies, crystals, affirmations, and on and on and on, but also playing them down as ‘woo woo’ without, y’know, actually debunking them.
It’s admirable, really. The hustler was trying to take advantage of the Barnum effect for their con – frame the topic to be woo, so as to both appear on the side of the audience and to make a generic, facile statement of skepticism that they can agree with; once marks are manipulated to think they’re entering the woo topic with an ‘open mind,’ it’s all aboard the Bullshit Express:
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810104425651
Journalling, then, was presented to me as an activity that was a means to an end – to what end, it’s quite plain to see. Even though I ultimately saw through most of the bullshit, that particular framing stuck with me. I can’t quite explain what changed in 2022-23 compared to 2020-21, but I stopped treating writing in my journal everyday as some aspirational, instrumental goal that, if I didn’t do, meant I was a fuckup.
What had been a spotty practice before became an everyday thing. I just wrote, indiscriminately. Journals are places where we might make notes or plan for future intentions, but they’re not magic artefacts that can direct destiny and yank your one desired future out of infinitely many outcomes. I’ve read in places that journalling is maintaining a relationship with yourself. If so, that means nothing’s off the table.
Maybe this is unique to me, but I’m not the only neurodiverse person who has been coerced into following routines, doing XYZ to attain this thing called ‘productivity,’ believing things that just aren’t grounded in reality, and so on. Kristen Carder, host of the I Have ADHD podcast recently did a few episodes on our struggle with self-trust:
“Honouring my word to myself” is such a toxic coaching thing to say. I’ve heard coaches say, “How in the world will you be able to trust yourself if you don’t honor your word to yourself?” And that is such neurotypical BS because, listen, an ADHDer is overcommitting constantly…
Kristen Carder, I Have ADHD (Episode 241, Why to ADHDers Struggle with Self-Trust: https://ihaveadhd.com/episode-241-why-do-adhders-struggle-with-self-trust/)
I am in this quote and I don’t like it but I feel heard. For me, journaling as a means to garner success by committing to things in writing was not it. Ceci n’est pas it, chief. I thought I could actually commit to everything and honour my word to myself and get things done and not feel like such a fuckup.
“Write aspirationally in your journal everyday, become the highest version of yourself, raise your vibration level – or you’re a fuckup.” It makes very little sense from a historical perspective and seems to be a modern affliction. What I would call my journal is something that only took form with the advent of the printing press and its ability to reproduce information at an industrial scale. It’s never not been a device for record-keeping and curating information.
Humans beings are, contrary to what we might expect, terrible for remembering. For ADHDers like me, it’s even worse – and I know for a fact I’m not the only one who can’t see more than three days into the future. Hell, I can’t even see three paragraphs ahead to host my own site locally:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/03/prologue/
It’s only through the regular logging and reviewing of our lives – in a blog, Zettelkasten, journal, whatever – that the fuzzy jigsaw puzzle begins to piece together.
I can recall more about what happened to me this year and last year because I scheduled things I needed to do, and wrote about my days indiscriminately. Granted, the stuff I write can be utter shite (journal, Zettel and blog) but without the journal, I’d spend much more of my days going through the motions, letting go of myself to be battered by debris in the slipstream. It helps me leverage a little bit of proactivity in a world that often pushes me to be reactive out of panic.
It’s much more empowering to treat my journal as a prosthesis. Not some aspirational vision board like so many people did at the start of the first lockdowns:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=manifesting
Take the journal away, and I can’t navigate the world nearly as well. The same would be true of wheelchair users if they woke up tomorrow to find that some Grinch had pinched all the access ramps in the world overnight.
The latter approach isn’t wrong in and of itself. The early days of COVID were defined by mass epistemic anxiety – we didn’t know when there’d be a cure, when we could go out, when we’d see our friends again. Everyone was scrambling for their own answers – when you’re alone, and the only window into the outside world is the world in your hands, seeing others “manifesting” on TikTok makes you feel empowered, like you can take the reigns into your own hands, wrestling them back from the intangible, omnipresent force that stole them from you by thinking positive thoughts.
What this approach fails to consider is that if we all woke up tomorrow and chose not to play the game – to stop producing capitalism, and thus the material conditions that shape our world – I’d still be in need of a journal for record-keeping and for revisiting. Said material conditions not existing would also make it very apparent that manifesting positive thoughts – and the Law of Attraction, by extension – is as batshit as “inspiring people out of poverty” – and looking for those quiet batpeople in society to prop us all up:
Think as a hacker would: for any productivity trick you wish to name – like the Pomodoro – that gurus promise will help you get things done, and bring more success into your life, check if there are studies that give credence to the benefits of these systems: that is, they can be shown to produce a quantifiable net positive output. If so, then the probability that some radical out there is using those techniques not to accelerate their own social mobility, but to plan the Revolution™, tends towards 1.
On Good Intentions
As a neurodiverse person, I have seen the business world appropriate the language of the neurodiversity movement, but leave out the bits it doesn’t like, because a radical paradigmatic shift in how we approach neurodiversity would mean it could no longer extract our ‘superpowers’ for profit; I’ve endured an endless barrage of mechanical metaphors about how autism is
“a different operating system,” or whatever. It’s an attempt at empathy that props us up as being inspiration pornstars, or machines, that I have very little patience for. We can speak for ourselves – thanking you!
Me and the family were out for tea recently, and, as it’s Christmas, every table was decked out with crackers. There was a Christmas tree. Traditions that we can trace back to the Victorians and further still gave the place a bad case of tinselitis. The season was ’tissed:
https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/not-even-a-little-bit-jolly-about
I’m intolerant to sudden, unexpected, unpredictable loud noises. I physically flinch and recoil. Before you start thinking about how I can help it from your own experiences – no, no I can’t help it. That said, Christmas crackers I can somewhat handle. It’s a snap you can hear in a raucous room, but the sound is not something that immediately upsets me.
But party poppers? Is that a regular tradition to have at the British Christmas table? Pop after pop after pop after pop from every single table. It was like cannon fire. I did the polite thing anyone distressed would do, and went out into the freezing cold for 15 minutes.
Picture yourself as the waitress who cared for us. You have a neurodiverse guest who dislikes loud noises. You know as well as they do that the popping will eventually stop. You also know that in the hour or so that they’ll likely spend dining, other tables will empty, and new diners will arrive. They’re expecting a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings (or fish and chips just for a change). What would you do to ensure everyone has a good time?
If you stopped setting up new tables with party poppers while the neurodiverse guest is present, you would not make a noticeable difference in the dining experience for the new guests. You would, however, make a substantial difference for the one guest who, up until now, has had to suffer at the expense of others’ enjoyment. Party poppers, like all traditions, can change, and are not as essential to our current rituals as, say, the tree, the baubles, the turkey, or even the paper hats.
What did our waitress do? She removed the crackers and party poppers from our table, but clearly did not discuss removing poppers from all future tables with her colleagues or manager, who regardless set up the tables as usual. They didn’t resolve the issue in any conceivable way.
I was reduced to an infant, forced to stick my fingers in my ears any time someone at our table gave me a warning signal. You may say I could’ve said something, but what difference would it have made? Those who had the power to remove the trinket that would not impact the dining experience for 99% of their future patrons did not act in a way that included me. If I had acted, no matter how polite, I would’ve invariably made a scene.
My point is not that the I think world revolves around me. There are, of course, far more critical matters happening across the world right now. My point is that someone else thought they knew what was right for me, and although they thought they were acting in my best interests, I was not given the power to have my say. That, of course, would be dictating the dining experience of everyone else. How dare I be so entitled. I ought to drop dead. Let people enjoy things.
It’s an oft-quoted phrase that tradition is just peer pressure from dead people. Traditions change – they are born and they die. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularised the Christmas tree and baubles custom; they also served boar’s head, which you seldom find on any Christmas table today, let alone the royal family’s:
https://www.royal-menus.com/queenvictoriachristmas
The boar’s head, in turn, was the roast of choice for those who could afford it, with historical evidence tracing the custom back to the medieval period:
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/christmas/medieval-christmas-food/
When I say the journal is my prosthesis, that’s a statement that’s come from within, not one that has been produced through external forces telling me how I should live. It is exercising my right to self-determination. It’s not something I do because I’m on that #GRINDSET. I need it like Winston needs his dummy leg or else he’ll fall over.
I’ve always written stories. I didn’t always write what was asked of me by the teacher (A horror writing prompt spilled over into an action-adventure buddy story). Nor did I stay under the word limit. They’ve always devastated me – you give me a pen so I can write and experience pleasure at being the cause, only to put a cap on how much fun I can have? Get lost! If Howard Garner’s theory of multiple intelligences is anything to go by (not to be confused with crank theories deployed in schools about different ‘learning styles’), then writing is how I’m most familiar with learning about the world:
https://www.britannica.com/science/multiple-intelligences
So, in a word: gie’s ma leg.
On the Journal as a Prosthesis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.