Thoughts on recording life
My best friend Rina moved to Japan a few days ago. We are now 9000km apart. I’m writing her letters, and putting them on Substack.
Something that has been on my mind for a while is how best to keep a record. I have always wanted to keep a diary, but have never managed to sustain one. It took Rina leaving and me decide to write letters to work out why.
The way I have come to think about it is that any writing practice has to feed into two buckets in some form. The first is processing, the value of producing the thing regardless of whether anyone ever reads it. The second is response, the value of the thing meeting the world, of people reacting to it and developing it with you.
This blog fills both of these buckets. Distilling a take into a framework I am confident in and can apply is both valuable cognitive work and I obtain value when it is reacted to. It is also writing under constraint, which is a kind of writing I enjoy. Art is creativity constrained, and a blog post constrains me in ways a Notion note or diary page doesn’t.
A diary fills neither. Recounting your day is minimal processing, matched or superseded by just talking about it in the pub (more enjoyable as well), and there is no opportunity for others to react. Its payoff sits decades in the future, when I write my political memoirs.
However, the blog does not make the need for a diary unnecessary. Distilling and abstracting consumes the particulars. By the time a thought has entered the blog here, the day-to-day facts that spurred it have been abstracted away. The blog records my conclusions, which are valuable, but even a perfect blog practice leaves the record incomplete when it comes to recording my life.
So I wanted a diary but could not sustain it, until Rina told me she was moving to Japan: writing to a real person disciplines the writing, selecting, framing, making the day tellable, especially for her. Publishing my letters provides a valuable response, people can read them, friends, family, and they’re easily recorded. What makes the letters worth observing is exactly the mundane detail a diary contains that I wanted to capture.
I hope I can keep writing to Rina, and I hope I can feel that I’m recording all aspects of my reality.