10 Years

It was on this day in 2001 that I first had the urge to write things, date them, and then put them on the internet. It was a sunny day, the first of a long summer following my penultimate year of high school. Like most of my creative endeavours it began with the simplest of whims, a phrase of description that popped into my head that I wanted other people to read:
"[W]e went to Vivek's after some organisation wrangling and ended up there with Sam and Ryan. We crashed there the night, hey, what am I saying? Crash is too cool for us... we slept over and we put on pajamas (sic) and had pillow fights. Perhaps imagine something in between and you'll be fine."

Fortunately for that whim I had a whole day, nay, a whole summer free to turn that notion into a reality. I spent the afternoon using notepad and Photoshop, creating a horrible mess of colours and tables and ending up with Brad's Summer Journal.

That's not a pisstake, this is actually what it looked like for the first year.

I had been writing things and putting them on the internet before the journal. In the year prior I had sporadically created a newsletter called Brad's Vital Statistics, which I believe further traces its roots to a gag email series I'd sent out in year 9 called Men's Day. After I started sending out BVSs, imitations from Ryan, Sam and Willy emerged to compete. There was some definite rivalry about who had the "superior" publication, and it was my competitive nature to first turn mine from an email into a weekly HTML page, and the same nature that made me think of publishing a daily journal rather than an irregular newsletter. After school finished for the year the competing publications dried up, and I envisioned the Summer Journal as my coup de grâce, the ultimate competition killer. Ten years later and, Sam, Ryan, Willy: I win, biatches.

Ten years is a long time to consistently publish your thoughts and ideas on the internet. What kind of benefits do you receive in life from meeting your commitment to such a thing? That's something I have pondered, so to celebrate a decade of journaling I thought I would look deeper into what life is like as a practiced journaller.

The number one benefit of a long running journal is perspective. I do tend to encode my real feelings into a lot of entries cryptically (not all, some are pure introspective info dumps, like this one.) This means that I can read at random my thoughts from any period in the past ten years and immediately access the feelings and state of mind I had at the time. The more I have done this kind of time travel the more apparent it has become to me how insignificant many of life's stressors really are. There are regular problems, and there are life changing problems and the former is much more common than the latter, despite what our minds try to tell us at the time.

The second notable advantage of perspective is learning that time is incredibly slow. I'm not kidding. Anyone who tells you that "the years go by so fast" could only believe that because they don't have a monthly summary of everything they've been doing for the past ten years. When you have access to a full journal of your life, and not just an archives listing, it becomes horrifyingly obvious that life is not fast, and that in general our society probably watches too much TV (and reads too many books.)

The second benefit of journaling is, for me at least, the requirement to justify your beliefs. It's very easy to think you believe or understand something until you're forced to explain it to someone else. And journaling has the added benefit of forcing you to explain it to yourself. It helps to develop wisdom. When I write something about myself, or the way I think something works, the fact that I've posted it is proof that I've considered it deeply. Or that it's 3am and I've just arrived home from Shenanigans.

Another benefit of writing relatively large quantities of words is the improvement to my spelling and grammar.

When I first started writing journal entries my use of English was akin to a lottery pick playing in the starting line up in his rookie season. Sure, there were some moments of brilliance, but overall it was unflattering and befuddling. Ten years of writing for an audience, no matter how tiny that audience has been, has motivated me to spell correctly and train hard in the off-season. Now I am like an experienced role player. I'll occasionally do something brilliant, but I'm mainly going to be picked for games because my fundamentals are rock solid.

Another side effect of long term journal writing is the mental effects. There's a narrator living in my head. Not many of the journal entries I think of end up published. In fact, 95% of them aren't even written. Instead they are spoken inside my head and judged by the faceless panel that filters my thoughts in terms of prose, entertainment and potential for running jokes. My written "voice" is actually the way I think the majority of the time.

I don't actually remember what life was like before my inner monologue was always in first person, past tense. If I'm actively engaged in something that requires my full attention it does tend to fade to the background, but at all other times it's there, sometimes to the point where I don't even think I'm the person doing the things I'm doing, I'm just the one watching them happen and providing context for anyone listening. This I actually believe is a little disconcerting at times.

Finally, a journal is an epic summary of the voyage of self growth that is life. I realised that pretty early on, reading back over my past entries and realising how my ideals, values and life skills all increased or changed. While my grey matter is still reasonably crisp I can usually read between the lines to recall and deduce the events or advice which guided me in a new direction. If I read for long enough I start seeing long, interweaving strands that start at my current characteristics and wind back through time to the events and forces that weaved them. This is like perspective, in that it helps me appreciate the journey of life as the slow, unstoppable thing that it is. It's also a separate "cool" thing, because it's really fascinating to see how simply and repeatedly we are changed, influenced and reprogrammed over the course of our life.

The bradism.com archives only go back to early 2004, this is mainly because I was still refining the filter on what is and is not suitable to publish on a journal that you can find by googling my full name. Of course, in the early days it wasn't hosted on a .com domain and everyone used Dogpile. The other reason is obviously so that I can have a second 10 year anniversary of bradism.com in early 2014. It's humorous to note that it's not only I that have changed and grown in the past decade, but my journal has changed and grown too. That's a journey I will spare you the details of for now. For today, happy birthday journal, you have been a most excellent tool in life so far. I'll see you again tomorrow.