by Jill Price
When people first hear about my journals, they often think that I must have memorized them and that they explain why I have such detailed recall. But the truth is that I rarely look at them, and have never spent much time reading back through them. If you look at the photo of one of them here you’ll get some sense of how voluminous they are.
For the single five-year period of January 1987 to December 1991, for example, my journal entries cover 350 double-sided 8½ × 11 inch pages, each side divided into 32 boxes of written text measuring 1.5 × 1 inch and containing roughly 60 to 70 words each. That means each side contains over 2,100 words, the equivalent of 9 typed manuscript pages per side, so my journals for just those years alone number more than 6,300 “typed” pages. The total number of pages in my journals written during all the years I’ve kept them is over 50,000.
I don’t sit and read through my journals, but I do dip into them now and then because I love to be able to go back and see my notes about all the little things that were going on when I was actually writing them. Many people find this one of the oddest things about the way that my memory has affected me. I know there is a contradiction here and it’s always been interesting to me. After all, with my memory, I should be the last person on earth who would need to keep a journal. The truth is I really don’t know why I was so compelled to write my journals. All I can really explain is what I found satisfying about keeping them.
I think my journaling is part of the same impulse that compelled me to save so many of the items of my life. The closest I come to understanding it is that writing a note about an event makes it real and forever part of history. Once it’s on paper, I own it, like owning my books or records or dolls. When a friend once said to me, “I don’t understand. If you have it all in your head, why do you need to write it down?” I told him it’s because in some indefinable way, it makes these memories real. For me, it’s a physical and emotional reassurance that the event really happened. I can’t accept living with just the memory. It has to be tangible—something I can hold on to physically, something I can handle. What feels to me like the most accurate explanation is that to write an event down means it really happened. It’s like creating an artifact. Archaeologists don’t just describe what they found of ancient civilizations. They bring back statues or pieces of pottery, and we build museums around them. My journals are like artifacts for me. I have the record in my mind, but I still want something I can physically look at and touch.
My journal entries are not reflective; they’re not commentaries on my life or a place where I work out my interpretations of my life. They are simple records, and the entries just describe key things that happened in a day. Here, for example, is what I wrote for Friday, February 26, 1993:
Wake up and hang out and relax. At 9 a.m. watch WWOR Noon News (from NJ) and at 9:17 a.m. Pacific Time it was announced that there was a bombing at the World Trade Center—glued to the television all morning—call Mom and tell her what is going on—watch TV all day—sit in the backyard and smoke and think about what happened today—sort of freaking out—leave at 2 p.m. and go to Woodland Hills to the Blue Cross office and sign my new insurance papers—home and hang out and watch TV, relax, eat dinner, talk on the phone, TV—watch Nightline about the WTC bombing—sleep.
As you can see, my journal entries show the lack of selectivity or focus on the most important moments of a day that is characteristic of my recall; that entry blends both the horrifying news of the World Trade Center bombing with the most trivial details.
I started journaling on Monday, August 24, 1981. I had met my first boyfriend in April. I was a sophomore, and he was a senior, and when he first flirted with me, I was nervous and a little intimidated. He drove a black Camaro with a T-top glass roof and had curly dark hair, and when I met him, he seemed mysterious, a type I find alluring. We didn’t start going out until June, and I was crazy about him and the whole experience of dating.
During that summer, I found myself compelled to write down the details of what we did each day on a wall calendar in my bedroom. This was when I launched into my practice of highly detailed journaling.
I think I was prompted to start this more detailed journal keeping because I knew that our relationship was bound to end before long; summer would end, and he was going to start college, and even though he was going locally, things would be different. I was so happy that summer, and I decided that I’d keep a physical record of every day for the rest of the time he and I spent together.
In fact, I had had a kind of prejournal period, which was preparation for writing the journals themselves. When I was a kid in Manhattan, I watched TV in the living room, and as I watched Walter Cronkite on the nightly news, one of my favorite shows, or The Dick Cavett Show (which I thought was called the Dick Carrot Show, because of his red hair), I would sit in front of the TV for hours watching the shows and draw lines like this:
—taking proto-notes before I knew how to write. Years later, in a funny twist, in the summer of 1986, I wound up having breakfast with Dick Cavett at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He was a client of my dad at that time. I was tempted to tell him how obsessed with him I had been, but I thought I should probably keep that to myself.
Even before that proto-journaling, I was drawn to record keeping. When we moved to California, I started creating a family tree of our extended family and ancestors on both my mother’s and father’s sides. I still update it regularly, and the whole family knows that I’m the keeper of our history. When someone has a baby, I add the child, and relatives call to make sure I’ve done so.
Then, in 1976, when my family went to Phoenix for Christmas vacation with two other families and stayed at the Arizona Biltmore, a vacation I love to remember, I had the urge to make a record of the trip. I was intent not to forget it, and I had the feeling that if I wrote it down, I could keep it with me, like the family tree and the little pocket book full of mementos that I had taken with me from New Jersey. That’s when I started writing brief notes on my Girl Scout calendar, which I kept doing year after year, until I got more elaborate with my note making that summer of 1981.
I’ve stopped journaling several times in my life, but eventually I would realize that I had to go back and get all of that time down. In 1987 I stopped writing in October and didn’t start up again until June 1988, when I realized I needed to stop the swirling in my head. It took almost a month, but I got October 1987 through June 1988 down. Then in November 1989 I started my first job, as a production assistant on the NBC sitcom A Family for Joe, which starred Robert Mitchum, and I was so busy at work that I couldn’t write. When I went on hiatus in May 1990, I again realized I needed to get everything down, and by Friday, June 15, 1990, I had all of 1990 written down in great detail.
In January 1997, I was adamant that I was going to stop: I wanted a break from all of the time it took, and I was determined that was it. I remember telling that to a friend, and he just laughed at me. Too many times my friends had seen me sitting in a corner scribbling notes to myself while everyone else was watching TV or listening to music at parties. Sure enough, that April I was visiting a friend in northern California, and I had brought my day-book with me. As I sat there in the hotel, I started writing everything from January on.
In 2000 I started my longest-running effort to stop; this time it was for four years. But in November 2004 I bought a blank book, divided it into the five years that had passed, and started to write again. By the end of the year I had it all down, and I felt immense relief. I no longer write in my journal most of the time, though, and when I look at my earlier journals now, I am glad that I don’t feel as much need to work on them so much. I occasionally decide I want to get back to it, but I’m more selective now about what I cover. After having stopped altogether in 2006, on January 1, 2007, I wrote down all of the special days of the year just passed. I did the same on January 1, 2008, for all of 2007’s special days.
I wish I could say that journaling kept enough control over the sw
irling of my memories that they didn’t overwhelm me anymore in the way they had in ninth grade. But when events were emotionally stressful, the memories would get the best of me again. The next particularly bad period after that breakdown in ninth grade, in which my memories raged out of control, was after my boyfriend broke up with me, on December 29, 1981, the day before my sixteenth birthday. We had a good relationship in the beginning, but like most other relationships at that age, the ending was miserable, and it took me a year to get over it. I have a friend who always said, “First loves kill you” and that was the case for me.
What was so devastating was not that I was really so in love with him, but that I kept reliving the relationship. My mind would flash back through the days we’d spent together, and even long after I should have been over him, I’d find myself remembering what we’d done on the same day the year before. We had met on April 1, and when April 1 rolled around, there I was right back in that prior year: It was two days after President Reagan was shot, and I was hanging out with my friend Dean under the tree near the school’s
counseling center and Dean introduced me to Harry…. And off my memory went. Then on April 5, I couldn’t stop thinking about how, that same day the year before, we had gone shopping together at the Galleria to find a birthday gift for Dean. My memory was stretching the pain of the breakup out beyond all reason; it would do that to me with many of the incidents of my life as I grew older.
Another thing that was intriguing to me about Benedict Carey’s article on writing life narratives was that the process can be therapeutic. It apparently can be a way of giving shape to and clarifying learning that’s happened in the course of one’s life, most often focusing on dramas of achievement, overcoming adversity, learning a major life lesson—stringing together a set of turning points or transformative changes, such as finding your life partner and how that changed you. That’s apparently why one’s narrative would likely evolve significantly if it was written at several different ages, accounting for changing life circumstances and new achievements, tragedies, and challenges.
Many years ago, psychologists articulated broad-brush descriptions of the shape of the general human life story, most famously Erik Erikson, arguing that each person’s life is broken down into a key set of phases, though there is some variation in exactly how many phases are identified and how they are named. One such schema of life’s “chapters” is infancy, early childhood, play age, school age, adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, and old age.
These more detailed life narratives that psychologists are now studying are a much more refined, individualized way of understanding the course of our personal development. A leading researcher in this field, Dan McAdams, has shown that a country’s culture probably influences the overall type of narrative that people in that country tend to tell, and for Americans, the life narrative is often one of redemption—in other words, of having overcome challenges.
What’s so intriguing to me about my experience versus what McAdams describes is that the impetus for me in getting my version of my life story down on paper was different. I found myself naturally drawn to the project of getting a delineation of the main epochs of my life down into an outline, which I refer to as my time line, in order to get the story fixed once and for all. I became almost compulsively fixated on doing so during a particularly stressful period of my post–high school life, and I think that the time line gave me some comfort and helped me feel I had made some sense of my life. I have never shared the time line with anyone before, including the UCI scientists.
It took me quite a bit of doing to get it down right. The notion that I ought to get the whole stretch of my life down this way formulated gradually, and I had been making notes on stickies and scraps of paper for some time and filing them away in a notebook. Then one day I suddenly felt the need to concentrate totally on getting the time line fully worked out, and on Sunday, June 17,1990, Father’s Day, I went to my room and worked on it for almost a full day. I’d get partway through and decide it was off in some way and tear those pages out and begin again. Finally, while watching my new favorite show, In Living
Color, I had the whole thing down, and I felt an enormous sense of relief and accomplishment.
The list spans my entire life segmented into eras, bookended by significant events. The italicized dates are days that I consider to be life changing—good, bad; it could be either. They are personal anniversaries, and every year I mark these dates when they occur.
You might get a better idea of the way my mind holds on to and sorts through my memories if you tried to break up your life in this way too. Take every significant period of time and date it; break it down into smaller periods of importance bounded by dates; and finally take the specific dates of life-changing events such as births and deaths and great successes and failures and write those in. I bet doing so will be a fascinating experience.
Here is what my time line ended up looking like, though this is an updated version, which I’ve added to in the years since. The original went only through 1990:
This is my version of the story of my life, I suppose. In crafting it, I did identify what I considered to be pivotal events and stages of experience. For example, one entry,
September 1980 through March 1981, was the first six months of high school, when I had just escaped from Westlake, the school I hated, and I was loving every minute of those months. Another, April 1983 through June
1983, covers the three months leading up to high school graduation, a period during which I was thinking a good deal about how much I had grown up.
Working out the phases of my life with such precision was comforting to me, perhaps in a way that is similar to the normal, more selective process of shaping one’s life story. But none of these “archaeological” exercises of getting my life down on paper helped me to privilege any of my memories over others, or to distort them in any way, and though some stretches of the time line delineate periods of happiness and of growth, others bracket periods of turmoil and depression.
Rather than using my memories to craft and then recraft the story of my life into a narrative, or as Dan McAdams puts it, into a personal myth, my mind has been intent on fixing all of them, exactly as they happened, in stone. As one article describing the work in narrative psychology explained the mythologizing process: “New work by psychological researchers shows that in telling their life stories, people invent a personal myth, a tale that, like the myths of old, explains the meaning and goals of their lives.” By contrast, I would say, my mind has simply told and retold itself the story of the days of my life, day after day, just as they happened. That’s not to say that I haven’t derived meaning and lessons out of my experiences; I have. I knew that I had grown a great deal through the course of high school, and in those last few months I reflected on that personal growth a great deal. But I also remembered myself as the kid who hadn’t grown up yet a great deal, and I think that undercut any ability to make any kind of myth for myself.
McAdams explains that “a life story is a personal myth” that helps to guide people toward the future with a sense of purpose. The fact that I didn’t really seem to craft that myth is the reason I struggled so much with heading into the future after high school. I wasn’t looking forward to college at the end of high school at all. Just the opposite. The more pressure I felt to move on and start a new life, the more emphatically I clung to my past because, I think, the future for me was all about a continuation of the past.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Speaking Memories
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
—Karl Menninger
Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand.
—Sue Patton Thoele
Although
selecting out positive memories wasn’t something my mind helped me do, another of the processes that research shows helps us to come to terms with our memories does seem to work well for me: the process of talking about them, or more precisely of sharing them with others.
During my twenties, as the grip of my memory became a stranglehold on my life, day-to-day living became a harder and harder struggle. These are extremely difficult years for me to travel back to. One of the reasons that this was true is probably that I had mostly stopped talking about how oppressive my memories had become. It was so hard to describe what was going on in my head and so frustrating—often enraging—when my parents and friends didn’t understand, that I pretty much gave up. Everyone in my life knew by this point that I had a remarkably strong memory. I’d share particular memories with them all the time, and fill in dates and remind them of times they’d forgotten as a matter of course. But what I didn’t share very much after a point was how horrible it was to live with my memory. If I did try to explain how my memories were driving me crazy, people would usually respond, “Oh, but it’s such a gift you have.” I couldn’t manage to describe what was going on in my head well enough, and they weren’t experts on memory and how it affects our lives. How could they have understood?
According to research showing the value of sharing the significant events of our lives with others through storytelling, I think this inability to explain how my memory was affecting me was itself an exacerbating factor in my memories dragging me down. The way that my memories had started rampaging out of control was the most significant happening in my life, and yet I could never truly find a way to describe it effectively, so I could never craft a meaningful story about it for my family and friends. Instead, I went increasingly interior with the torment of it, and I felt horribly alone in my mind.