I am a Journaler
In my senior year of high school I take an independent study program, an English class dedicated to a yearlong, student-led, self-defined project. For my project, I construct a language (a "conlang"), producing a descriptive grammar and vocabulary more than a hundred pages long. Part of the grade for the course is based on a journal kept during the project - I write almost two hundred pages in my journal that year, filling a thick spiral bound notebook. I still have it.
In the spring of my senior year of college, I write an undergraduate thesis for a double-major in Linguistics and Russian Language. I start keeping a journal during this period, though I don’t call it that. I carry a Moleskine notebook with me everywhere. In it I write out quotations longhand from scholarly works I am reading and want to cite. My thesis ends up over eighty pages long. I am told it resembles a masters thesis more than an undergraduate thesis, at least in its length. I take that as a compliment.
I carry that Moleskine notebook with me to graduate school, filling it over the next three years with research ideas, more quotations and bibliographical information, and notes on talks I attend. I attend a lot of talks, and I list them all in that notebook. I fill up the last pages of that journal about the same time I drop out of my PhD program to pursue a career in industry. I do not get to write a PhD dissertation. I expect if I did, it’d be a thousand pages long.
I buy a new Moleskine, a bright yellow one, when I start a software engineering apprenticeship after leaving graduate school. I take detailed notes as I ramp up in the domain of professional software development: multitenancy, microservices, publish vs release vs deploy, CI/CD processes. My note-taking tapers off as I get onboarded and acclimated. This journal doesn’t get filled.
My son is born three years later. I first try bullet journaling around the same time, in a brand-new Moleskine notebook bought just two weeks after his birth. My first entries deal with the logistics of a newborn baby - notes on doctor appointments and daycare schedules. I have trouble following Ryder Carroll’s bullet journaling system. I don’t stick with it.
Several years later, with my son now five and my daughter three, I rediscover my old graduate school journal research notebook. More than a decade after writing it, memories come flooding back to me as I leaf through it. I am there again in the stacks in Watson Library, in my advisor’s office in Wescoe Hall, and at Dempsey's, studying with my now-wife over burgers and beers during happy hour. I want to have that feeling again, a decade from now - I want to be able to jump back to today's moments when my kids are older. I start writing in that journal again. This time I worry less about following the specifics of the bullet journal system. This time I stick with it.
Later that summer, my family and I take two weeks and drive 4500 miles around the western US, from Kansas City to Los Angeles and back. We take a southerly route westward, through Albuquerque to the Grand Canyon to the Mojave desert, and a northerly route back, through Utah and Colorado to Devil’s Tower, the Badlands, and Minnesota. I journal the whole trip - all our campsites and hotel stays, all the sights we saw, all the noteworthy restaurants we ate at, all the national parks we visited.
Six months later, I fill that Moleskine notebook, the one I had bought after my son was born. I write the last page in it the week he turns six. I think to myself as I complete that volume “now I am a journaler”, but I am wrong. I have been a journaler for most of my life. I have just become consistent in my journaling practice, and I no longer journal in fits and starts. I have written a page or more in my journal every day for the last one hundred and fifty days. Journaling is the first thing I do in the morning (after making coffee), and it is the last thing I do before I go to sleep I show no signs of stopping.