I have been keeping a journal since I was 12 years old. My first diary was given to me as a Christmas gift. It was one of those 5 year diaries with a lock and key that people usually give young girls to record their thoughts and feelings. Some time after losing the little key I cut off the flap and lock that held it shut.

The Diary that Began it All

I still have that diary (obviously, since to your right there’s a photo of it). I keep it in the large plastic box with all my other journals from the last 36 years.

In my young adult years, I liked to use those stenographers pads with the spiral binding at the top. Later, I switched to ordinary college-ruled spiral notebooks.

Most recently, I’ve been using a hardcover coilbound notebook marketed by Staples.

I only have two minor complaints about this notebook.

The first is that it doesn’t have a built-in bookmark of any kind. So I taped a ribbon into the back of it then drape the ribbon over the next page to hold my place.

The second is that it doesn’t have a loop to hold my pen. The Sharpie retractable pen is too thick to fit into the wire coil, which would be my preferred pen storage method. But also at Staples, I found these adhesive elastic loops that work very well. They don’t come unattached no matter how tangled the pen gets in my book bag and the pen doesn’t fall out of the loop. It’s a snug fit for the Sharpie, but a perfect fit for other thinner retractable pens.

My Current Journal with Bookmark and Pen

I don’t write in my journals every single day. In fact, there are some gaps in my journal-keeping that span months. But any future biographer will not have much trouble piecing together what I did, thought, or felt most of the time.

Nowadays, however, my journal keeping is more complicated. Not only do I have the hardcover notebook as the main receptacle of my thoughts, but I also have sketchbook that I often carry out with me, and a Rite-in-the-Rain field journal that I carry to record bird and animal sightings.

But wait… there’s more. I also have boxes of finished and unfinished fiction and non-fiction manuscripts, finished and unfinished artwork, binders filled with past blogs, a large box of CDs and DVDs containing photographs, in addition to all the printed photos from before digital cameras, and boxes of ephemera from various trips and shows and probably every movie ticket stub from the last 10 years if not more.

One of my goals for at least 5 years now has been to organize all that stuff, at least by year, so that it can be eventually scrapbooked somehow, or easily used for the memoirs I will someday write. And I even hired help for a while to transcribe my diaries and sort old papers. But there’s never enough time to sort through the records of my old life because I’m constantly trying to live my current life right now, and the journal entries and movie stubs keep piling up.

Maybe someday I’ll get it together. Get it sorted. Write my autobiography.

In the meantime, I keep writing, drawing, blogging. Adding to the pile.