Keeping a Journal/Diary........

[Guest RushNY]

Hey guys,since the turn of the year i have been keeping a daily log/journal the sort of thing that you write down how you are feeling,what you think about certain issues and i must admit its been a big help to me,i didnt think it would help at all,my intinal reaction was to think that it would be a waste of time and i was busy enough as it was without having to spend more time doing this,but i admit i was wrong at the end of a day it feels good to unburden myself by writing down my thoughts and feelings ,does anyone else do the same thing dont tell me i'm the only one PLEASE !;-)

[SFViking]

You're certainly not the only one here; one of the escorts who posts here frequently keeps his journal online at livejournal.com. I've been keeping my journal (mostly privately) for over 30 years; it has served different purposes at different points in my life. (If there's more discussion about journals here I can say more.)

[Guest DevonSFescort]

>You're certainly not the only one here; one of the escorts

>who posts here frequently keeps his journal online at

>livejournal.com.

 

You've gotta be kidding me. How big is HIS ego? }> :+

 

>I've been keeping my journal (mostly

>privately) for over 30 years; it has served different

>purposes at different points in my life.

 

I agree about journals serving different purposes at different times in one's life. Until starting my online diary last Thanksgiving, I had never kept a written one religiously, but I tended to keep them at critical points in my development (coming out to myself, during my travels in Europe, during a photography class that blew the world open for me). Looking back on those diaries I feel that they did not merely record my life at those times, but they also influenced me deeply; they had a real impact on decisions I made. So the diaries would change my life which would in turn change the diary. Though diary-keeping is a contemplative, often inward-looking process, it is also dynamic and active.

 

In recent years my diaries have been more visual. I kept a Polaroid diary for two and a half years, taking one Polaroid snapshot every day. It's wild to look back on a picture you took of anything -- a friend, a cat, your coffee mug -- and have all the memories of that day come racing back. A photo/text diary I kept during a class I took when I lived in Boston not only documented my progress with photography but big things that were happening in my sex/love life, new people I was meeting as a result of making pictures, a change of residences, etc. A video diary I kept at art school was painfully self-revealing and quite therapeutic. And now, in addition to the online diary, I'm doing one small painting a day, the idea being that in a month's time I'll have generated thirty images in a addition to whatever else I'm working on. I'm thinking it might be interesting someday to show paintings from the visual diary together with entries from the corresponding dates in my online diary.

 

It's interesting keeping a public diary, because you are limited by there being a great number of things you CAN'T write about, especially, hello, given what I do. In a way this content restriction becomes a formal restriction which forces you to get creative. However I feel that I probably need to supplement it more with a private journal, because things happen all the time that I'd put in the public diary if I only could. But then again having the diary online is what motivates me to write every day. Whereas I can paint and not care if anyone sees it, when I write I want to feel like I communicating with somebody. Just knowing somebody's out there reading is enough to keep me coming back to write. It's also a motivation to try and do something interesting every day so my readers are happy with their subplots.

 

Then there are diaries you DON'T keep, where you write/draw/do whatever in a stream of consciousness mode for awhile and then throw it away. Someone told me about keeping one of those recently. The surrealists were big on automatic writing. I feel like meditation is sort of like one of these kinds of diaries, but in a physically embodied state; it's again not a diary you "keep" but one you let go.

 

Anyway, that's wonderful that you've got 30 years of journals -- what an amazing record! If most of those in San Francisco I can only imagine the stories! Congrats to RushNY on discovering the joys of journal keeping -- they can be really helpful things.

[+ Charlie]

I keep a journal with detailed narrative descriptions of every experience I have ever had with an escort (22 years worth of entries). Sometimes it is useful when trying to decide whether to hire someone I haven't had in a long time (at least one guy I had twenty years ago is still advertising), but more often it is just fun to read and remember. It has also occasionally served as a useful database for topics that come up on this site that I want to respond to.