Under an awning at night with the rain coming down. On the top deck of a bus travelling between parties at opposite ends of London. Leaning against the cubicle door of a pub toilet. These are some of the places I have written Google Docs diary entries in the past week. Mostly I do so via the Google app on my phone in a document titled Written Version of 2022. It contains everything you might imagine – slipshod accounts of nights out and lists of everything I recall drinking, lines from poems and films and songs, screenshots of paintings, recipes, scraps of news, seasonally dependent paeans or fury directed towards the weather, honest accounts of my emotional state, less honest accounts of my emotional state.
At the time of writing, Written Version of 2022 is 52,000 words and 85 pages long. Sometimes I’ll augment it with new events two or three times per day. As things happen to me, I am already speculatively ordering them into a narrative, my so-called version of events becoming overlaid with their real-time unfurling. All this is to say, I’m worried my chronic diary-writing habit is starting to get in the way of me actually living my life.
Recently I was out with someone, experiencing something unlike anything else I’d experienced before (I’m choosing my vague words carefully, as this is not a private diary entry). I could not stop verbalising what was happening to me. Eventually the other person said: “Can you just shut up and be in the moment! Save it for your diary or a think piece or whatever.” I did shut up. But I also thought: that line would be great for my diary. Or a think piece.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote about the damaged relationship and false equivalence between writing and truth in his essay Plato’s Pharmacy. The text centres on his reading of an Egyptian myth recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus. Thoth, the god of the moon (among other things), comes to the king of the gods, Thamus, with an offering of several inventions for the Egyptian people, including geometry, astronomy and writing. In his sales pitch for writing, Thoth tells Thamus that the discipline will “make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories”. Plato uses the Greek word pharmakon to describe Thoth’s innovation, a term of especial value to Derrida for its polysemic properties – it can mean both remedy and poison – which are lost in the act of translation. Thamus counters Thoth: the invention of writing will have the exact opposite effect, producing “forgetfulness in the souls who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories”.
In the last few months, the ticker between good and bad, remedy and poison, which I imagine floating above my diary writing habit, has quivered ever closer to the negative end. It’s why I’ve been toying with giving it up, perhaps even deleting the evidence. Writing provides us with a vitiated form of the past. Friends often tell me they avoid transcribing negative memories into their diaries. It’s too painful, or they don’t want to remember those times in years to come. We write about the good stuff in order to savour and elongate those experiences of happiness, hoping they may reassure an older us that our younger years were well-lived (though I sometimes wonder if an older me might respond to this diary with an entirely different set of emotions to the ones I’ve guessed at).
I know my account of events is partial. I know it forecloses the opportunity for dialogue, disputation and correction, which I am so grateful for in my daily life – when friends remind me: It didn’t happen like that; I saw it this way. (As a child, the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel was so dismayed by the bias of her own subjectivity she developed the anxious tic of writing “I think” before each sentence of her diary – I think I went swimming; I think we went to church etc). And I know, too, that my habit of constantly re-reading my own record of days (using control-F to time-travel back through experiences with particular people) makes it even more likely that my diary will usurp or become a substitute for the true past (if such a thing ever existed).
All these things I know and each is a good enough reason not to begin a Written Version of 2023. But that’s not the whole story – after all, writing is a pharmakon. There wasn’t a Written Version of 2021, just a few aborted Docs here and there (though there was one for 2020, and most years prior to that in physical form). For the duration of that year I was in a relationship. And while that was going on, it felt dishonest to write about my life as if it were a singular experience, when so much of it seemed shared between us.
Only after we broke up did I start my compulsive chronicling again. When you are single, your life closes down. It becomes easier to manage the borders, control the narrative. Maybe that sounds like a negative consequence. But diary writing has also been a great comfort to me since then, not just because it gives me something to do on solitary evenings, but because it’s come to stand for the personal freedom I have rediscovered this year, the textual expression of striking out alone. So I think I’m willing to take the poison, as long as it means I get to keep the cure, for now at least.
Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town
