The Drawer of Unfinished Journals
eleven pages in, every time
There’s a drawer, or a shelf, or a box at the back of a closet. In it are four or five notebooks, and every one of them has between six and twenty pages filled. The handwriting is careful at the start and gets looser, and then it stops, usually somewhere in February.
You bought the next one, so it wasn’t that you didn’t care.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Peaches at the stand. Bought far too many.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
Nice notebooks are hard to actually use
A beautiful blank book asks to be filled with something worthy of it. The entry has to be legible, reasonably interesting, and not end mid-thought. Cross something out and the page looks spoiled. Skip a week and the gap is right there in the paper, in order, every time you open it.
That’s a lot to ask of a tired Tuesday night, and most nights are tired Tuesday nights.
There’s nothing here to keep nice
Little Memory, an iPhone app, has no pages to fill and no object to spoil. There’s no handwriting to be ashamed of, no leftover blank space at the bottom of an entry. Days you didn’t write don’t sit in a stack where you can see them. There’s nothing to ruin.
One sentence can’t be done badly
An entry is one line about something that happened, about fifteen seconds. Fixed the gate. Ate lunch outside for the first time this year. Long call with Mom, good one. There’s no length to fall short of and no one reading over your shoulder, so there’s nothing for perfectionism to get hold of.
The reminder arrives in the evening and replying to it saves the day, which also means there’s no clean new notebook waiting to be started properly. You answer an email, and that’s the entry.
I’ve tried for years and years to keep a journal. I tried various apps and tried using txt files. This app is so simple I don’t “feel bad” writing a sentence or two and being done.
Dropkick, App Store Review
Why this one gets past February
Paper journals ask you to keep writing on faith. The good part is somewhere years off. Little Memory brings it closer: your lines come back a week later, a month later, and then on this day every year. Within a week you’re already reading something you wrote.
Keep the nice notebooks for the days that deserve them. This is for all the other days.
If it’s the empty screen that stops you rather than the standard, there’s a page on blank page anxiety. If it’s the writing itself, try journaling when you hate writing. And if the notebooks were only ever part of a longer list of things that stopped in February, there’s journaling with ADHD. Or the little tour.
