Reading My Journal, Considering Some Lists
in which "nothing exists unless I maintain it" or my name's not Susan Sontag!
About ten years ago, I was home for the Thanksgiving holiday, cozied up in my childhood bedroom reading before bed when I started receiving a flurry of texts from my then-boyfriend.
At first, the texts seemed nonsensical. It was like he was quoting something I’d read before, but I couldn’t remember what.
Then something felt too familiar. I realized what was happening. He was quoting me. He was texting me lines from my old journals. Not only that, he was texting me my own old, long-buried secret — something I had told no one about, not when it was happening, not after it was over, and something I had planned to mention to no one, ever.
I don’t remember how I responded, or what exactly happened next. I remember arguments. I’m sure they were ugly. I could tell you it was the beginning of the end of that relationship, but that’s too neat, and also unfair. I behaved badly, too — both before and after his binge-read through the archive of my journals and notebooks, and those cruel, mocking texts that followed.
I remember the feelings, though. Mostly, shame. But also: Anger. Blinding, white-hot rage! Also: regret. Regret for choices I had made nearly 10 years earlier. Regret I had written it down. Regret I didn’t burn that journal, and all the others. Regret I gave that motherfucker a key to my apartment!
Here’s the thing, though — it doesn’t matter. When I think about it now, more than 10 years after this incident, nearly 20 years out from the actual thing — the secret, my shame — the entire scene feels like it happened to someone else.
I picture him, sitting on the floor of my old apartment, my journals from my teens and 20s spread out around him, texting me lines from them, and I’m laughing at how silly and sad it all is. What had he hoped or worried he would find? Did he find it? The proof?
Proof of … what?
While he wasn’t the first or even second person to have invaded my privacy and read my journals, my emails, my text messages, you name it, someone I dated snooped through it, after that night he texted me lines from my own journal entries, something changed. I have never kept a journal in quite the same way again.
Snoop through my journals today, and good luck finding any secrets! Enjoy the random Sylvia Plath quotes, travel ideas, packing lists, and detailed updates about my gut health, though.
Great news: I feel fine about this, and it seems only natural that my personal record-keeping would evolve over the course of my teens and 20s and 30s and beyond. As I flip back through my most recent journal, it is indeed mostly quotes, poem drafts, random accounts of the day, lists, and sometimes a combination of all of those things.
You can even take a look. Who cares? I can barely even read my own handwriting in some cases, nor can I always make sense of it. No wonder when so-and-so texted me that crap I had written years earlier, I almost didn’t recognize it.
Sometimes it’s painful, remembering, like when I found a journal from high school and unintentionally opened right to an almost-forgotten trauma, something I thought existed only in my memories. But then there it was, in exacting detail, in big, loopy handwriting that didn’t even look like my own, not anymore.
Sometimes these things are mundane, and funny to revisit, if only to me. Like on September 23, 2024, when I felt compelled to write down that I was “v. emotional / moody”; “went to Whole Foods; felt insane.”
No one needs to read any of that; that’s why it was scribbled in a notebook.


“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
[…]
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”
— Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem
While I don’t suggest or condone reading people’s private journal entries, dammit if I don’t love reading a writer’s journal. They’ve been published, so someone agreed to it along the way and it’s fair game, right? Favorites over the years have included: Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Susan Sontag.
Here I am, writing shit in my journal like:
“finish prep for Barcelona —
other idea: write something beautiful, make everyone laugh and cry and be stunned by my brilliance — ha, ha!
thought: are my collages stupid, or — ? does it matter? I like it —”
Sunday, 2/18/24
And here’s Susan!
“So the problem isn’t how to keep things from coming alive that should be neutral, lifeless, unconcerned with my existence. My old solutions: “culture,” my mind, my passions for thought, for art, for spiritual + ethical distinction.
I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make ‘lists.’ The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist until I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.
Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.”
— Susan Sontag, August 9, 1967, journal entry
“I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make ‘lists.’”
Susan, what?
I perceive value! I confer value! I create value!
Honestly, I don’t know what S.S. is talking about a good chunk of the time, but I love it. And it’s true, the woman wrote a ton of lists. Lists of movies she’s seen, books she’s read, lists of I-don’t-know-what. (You can find these in As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Journals & Notebooks 1964 — 1980.)
Have you been wondering what that cranky lil’ bunny illustration was about as you’ve been reading all this? Well, for starters, I picture him snooping through my old journals and it makes me laugh. But mostly, it’s because in one of Susan’s lists, “Dürer” is a thing she likes. So I googled that, because no, I was not familiar with the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer, and here we are now, all appreciating that incredible illustration of a hare!



Thanks to Susan, two things are true: One, that if anyone reads my notebooks, they’ll find my many lists of “things I like; things I dislike” and two, that I am setting an intention to capture a list of the things I liked, disliked, loved, and loathed in 2024. Remember: “The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist until I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.”
Business firms? Seriously, Susan, what? More like music, movies, TV shows, and books.
Maybe I’ll post those lists here. Or, when I go home for the holidays, you can break in my apartment, snoop through my drawers, read my notebooks, and then text me your favorite lines!
What a beautiful, “mostly subliminal” thing it will be!
related:
IN SEARCH OF THE STORY (in new directions)
“A failure of nerve. About writing. (And about my life — but never mind.) I must write myself out of it.
Traveling Alone
things I dislike: that in-between time, when I feel I need to speak out loud, to prove I still exist; the men who stare too long; the “are you traveling alone?” question; the plotting of my fake story of who I am meeting and when because I am a woman alone and my existence must be paired with preparation and constant fear of attack; the nightmare, the 3…