I don’t generally pay a lot of attention to transitions dictated by the calendar. I don’t do much to mark my birthday, for instance, and I’ve never been given to making resolutions just because the count of years clicks up by one. I’m not claiming that this is any better than any other way of doing things, by the way – it’s just how I am. But my life is just as subject to the socially organized rhythms of life in a white-dominated capitalist settler colony as anyone else’s. And given that I have a year-round predilection for self-reflection in print – journalling is the best way to name it, I guess, though that makes it sound fancier than the repetitive, deeply unaesthetic, and boring-to-anyone-but-me character that it often has – I have fallen into a pattern of using this time of year, and particularly the strange lull between December 25th and the resumption of regular work routines in early January, to do lots of private writing about the year just past and the year to come.
My interest in journalling comes from a few different places, I think. I’ve always been a compulsive archivist, for one, and I like to have a record of things, even things that I very well know that no one – not even me – will care about in a week’s time, let alone a year’s or a decade’s. Also, in my work as a writer, I’ve organically developed practices and preferences that mean that it just feels most natural to think things through with a pen in my hand or a keyboard beneath my fingers – it’s how I’ve trained myself to reflect, for reasons initially more about the writing than the reflecting, but with the unexpected consequence that it’s now how I’m most able to reflect.
Another part of this attachment is an awareness of how this kind of regular, repeated action can be a form of self-fashioning. It is a way of incrementally becoming other than you have been shaped to be that emerges from the slow, not necessarily predictable alchemy of persistent practice applied to self. I think I’ve always had an instinct that this was the case, and at a certain point I read writers who – particularly if you’re careful to read them in materialist ways – provide a sort of theoretical grounding for it. I’m thinking of people like Michel Foucault and Ladelle McWhorter, though it’s been quite awhile since I’ve read either so I may not be remembering them quite right.
Despite this commitment to journalling for its own sake and to journalling as a technology of self, I also have some ambivalence about it all as well. We live in an era that often gets described as “neoliberal.” That means a bunch of things, but it includes an emphasis in our culture on a particular atomized, fragmented version of the individual, and a powerful pressure from the institutions and the messages that shape us to improve ourselves at the individual level. There are countless resources focused on any number of specific areas that help us become better selves – more productive, more successful, more moral, happier, whatever. This is not unrelated to the emphasis in earlier social formations on Christian, particularly Protestant, moral self-improvement, but today it is often at least subtly connected to our capacity to be useful in the capitalist economy. And it has a renewed vigour and ubiquity in recent decades, as collective institutions face ongoing attack and elites work very, very hard to make sure we have no one and nothing to count on but ourselves. So my ambivalence is out of a concern that this practice is a sort of capitulation to neoliberal culture, which I should be refusing and resisting.
I have to say, though, that these misgivings don’t really exert much power over me. Journalling as a practice to help me keep my days on track, to help me write the things I want to write, and to help me be who I want to be, fits with my life. And, yes, I live in this moment, not a different one. My sense of what it means to be a self developed pretty much in exact tandem with the neoliberal era, which started to take shape in the decade in which I was born. The options that I have for knowing about the world, for engaging with the world, for figuring out what it means to be a person in the world are, by necessity, going to be shaped by that reality, even if some part of me yearns for the other worlds which we know are possible and which we can collectively bring into being – worlds in which the isolation, the fragmentation, the individual-on-their-own-ness of today is replaced with a richer intersubjective, woven-together, individual-in-collectivity-in-the-social-ness. And as much as part of me would like to have some clear, ready-made we as the basis for engagement with living in and trying to transform the world, I just don’t have that. Even given the various kinds of we that I am a part of and that I aspire to be part of in the future, especially for the kind of self that I am and the shape of social world in which I currently exist, I is an important starting point for making any of that happen. I-in-relation, sure – we are never as isolated from the social world as we’re told or as we often feel. But, still, in figuring out how to act, how to be, I can’t just skip over I. And for me, a big part of that is journalling, including in intensive ways in late December and the first couple of days of January.