I’ve decided why I don’t like journaling online. Well, there are several reasons.
1. You are forced to stare at a screen. I don’t know where I got the old school notion of staring at screens being really bad for your eyes but I have it. I also believe in the various medical reports that say staring at a screen before bed makes it harder to fall asleep. And since I never seem to get adequate sleep and falling asleep is an almost hour affair for me I don’t take well to the idea of something making it even more difficult.
2. In an old journal entry I said “You can tell a lot about my mood by my handwriting.” And it still holds true. When I was feeling on top of my shit my handwriting had a certain allure to it. Not ever very neat but legible and exciting. And when I was feeling shitty my hand writing was sharp and totally lacking of effort. With online journaling you don’t get that shift in mood. Its like every night the voice sounds the same because it looks the same.
3. I can’t doodle. My journals have such telling doodles on the side. When I would be talking on the phone with a boy in the middle of journaling there were always tons of doodles framing the entry. Also, sometimes (as in almost all the time) my thoughts aren’t conveyed well enough with just text. It takes a diagram or chart or series of lines and arrows to get across what I mean to say. With this shit, I can’t get out that easy. I have to make it make describable sense.
4. Everybody else is doing it. Everyone’s a writer/blogger/photographer/model/singer/actress/promo guy/ect/ect/ect. Gross and enough. And also why I don’t like putting my personal feelings online. My journal was always my safe haven. My little world where I talked to only me and could be totally myself because only myself was listening. (I later found out my mom, too was a member of that audience). I feel like my writing instantly changes when I think of others looking in. Which is why I’m saying this blog is for me only. Which it is.
5. My typing “voice” is annoyingly sarcastic. Can’t you tell already? Its like the ease of writing makes me say more bullshit. When writing physically in a journal you always run the risk of a hand cramp. In fact, you’re certain its going to happen at some point in the process or another. So you use your words wisely, choose vocabulary carefully and cut out the excess. Like, in a hand written journal I couldn’t do this: blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Or better yet I could, I just most definitely wouldn’t. “Blah” is a pretty difficult word to type over and over again actually.
6. I’m just plain prejudice against it. Like how our parents refused the idea of texting for so long. I’m only 20 so yeah I should hop on this bandwagon but something in me just likes the “good ‘ol days” of paper and pen.
Reasons why, during the duration of writing the above entry, I grew to really like online journaling.
1. My voice isn’t as different as initially expected. In fact, this is pretty much how I think I would sound if I were writing this in a composition book right now.
2. I can get out more thoughts. Many nights I’d have a head full of ideas and feelings but the physical act of writing was too much. Things flow a lot easier using the computer to journal I’m discovering. I can think something, and then put it down .
3. I like the sound of the keyboard. Don’t think I need to go into detail much about this one.