Have You Ever Kept A Diary?

Prompted by cleaning my pit after a coivd tussle, and finding some old notebooks, I would be intrigued to know what percentage of ilxors keep/have kept some form of diary and what form they take etc?

I've tried various things over the years and it's always 'something' to look back, however low the velleity - to see how little one's obsessions change, but mainly for the notes I've taken from books. This kind of marginalia still creates a sense of possibility somehow.

Anyway, diaries?

yes, aged about 14-23 I kept it up sporadically, still have boxes of them in the garage, tell myself they are "for a project"

whenever I try to read them they send me off on a day of reflection / regret, not sth I really have time for.

ive kept a fairly regular diary for fifteen years. my early entries are scattered in notebooks, but somehow over the course of five or six laptops and one year of typewritten entries i have meticulously archived my diary into one long .txt file. i mostly make very brief, semi-fictional entries of daydreams, night-dreams, prayers, recovered memories or mundanities of the day. it's my safe place and i never feel pressured to write. the page always listens to me. sometimes i wish i could share it with everyone. i don't take many photos, so it serves as a better way to remember times, sometimes. every once in a few months i'll scroll back and read over entries and find myself surprised. i feel like i write in a fugue state or something most of the time. my favourite fiction is epistolary and i think it's a great format and a very healthy routine to maintain.

I tend to feel more like CaAL about my notebooks: such promise on the outside, but when I look at them, I just get the melancholy of lost futures - things I didn't do, writing projects never completed. Ah well. I guess I'll be glad they exist at some point.

All that said, I've been keeping an Evernote journal this year and have managed to keep it up every day. Kind of like maelin suggests, with the digital equivalent of scribbled notes, less thought out the better. I've been looking back and it's an interesting document. If you're me.