I’m overly sensitive to criticism, so when I feel like I’ve irritated someone, offended someone, or done something wrong, it becomes a huge preoccupation.

Online, this manifests itself as checking out the complainant thoroughly. I’ll Google them, visit their blog, and obsess over what to do in response even when the best answer is often to do nothing. And it doesn’t take anything particularly nasty to set me down that path. Even an ambiguous comment that hints at displeasure can be enough to get me derailed and focused on that person and their approval.

This is indicative of a character issue–caring too much about the approval of strangers, so I’m focusing on that as an area of growth. In the meantime, it’s a pretty effective way to get me to pay attention.

Of course, as with most matters of ego, there is a flip side. I don’t handle praise all that well either. I’ll pay the wrong kind of attention to the stats, the links, comments, and kind words that come from a job well-done. It can be addicting.

These are two sides of the same coin stamped with the word “ego,” and I fully accept that the frivolous drinking-in of positive attention only serves to make my concept of self-worth more bloated and, as a result, less stable. I honestly have not set out to manufacture compliments with this project I’m working on, but as many kind people have provided them, I have lingered there a bit too long.

It’s my hope that, in the near future, my concept of self-worth will be more fully guided by steadier, more substantial forces than these. Until then, I am well aware of these tendencies and guard against them.

If, however, these tendencies influence my running of the project in any way beyond the hand-wringing and angst, it will be in a prejudicial over-caution against highlighting those who laud me.

I’ve never kept a journal, but I’ve started plenty of them. My first attempt at autobiography was written in second grade, at the desk in my bedroom, either encouraged to write by my mother or in fulfillment of an assignment from school. I certainly didn’t come up with the idea on my own.

My First Journal

I remember that I wrote with a dull pencil, lightly marking the page with meandering letters. Without lines to guide me, my sentences wandered up and down.

I can picture the handwriting (probably because it looks much the same today), but I have only a faint notion of what I wrote about on those pages. My inability to recall writing about recess is not surprising; in general, my memory is poor.

There is actually one bit of writing that I can clearly recall, and of everything that could have stuck in my memory, I’m amused that this is all I can come up with:

“Tonight was Johnny Carson’s last show.”

It might have been phrased differently, and I know at least “Johnny” was spelled differently, but I recorded that fact on May 22, 1992 because my mom told me that it was a big deal and that it would be good to write down. I included it despite having never watched the show and not caring at all that it was ending.

I don’t know how long I wrote in that first journal, but I stopped before the practice had a chance to become a habit. However brief it might have been, if journaling is supposed to help you cement memories, my first attempt has proved to be a success–just not in the intended way.

The act of writing the journal itself became the memory.

I can recall the paper, my writing, the white and red writing desk, my room, and my bunk beds. I remember not knowing of Carson, my feet not touching the ground, and the excitement in my mom’s voice as she tried to convey the significance of an era ending.

There aren’t many experiences that I can definitively tie to an exact date. I tend to get one Christmas confused with another, for instance. But in this case, I have an entirely unremarkable hour in my youth that is both remembered and attached to a definite date.

In that memory, I can find something interesting about my mother. I can place Johnny Carson in the context of my personal experience. And I can place my childhood experience in the context of my adult conception of time.

I wrote in a journal that evening, but it is only now that I’m really capturing what it is that makes that day interesting for me in hindsight. If I can find it (I’m sure my mom will look for it when she reads this), I’ll post what the entry I wrote on that day says.

That’s my first experience with journaling, and it comes full-circle in an interesting way in this post. In the interest of disclosure, though, I have to address the other journaling experiences I’ve had.

A Chronicle of Chronicles

I think I waited until high school to try journaling again, but I made up for the lost time by starting several within a couple of years. I had a genius for one of my best friends, and he had excellent, tiny handwriting and plenty of ink-worthy thoughts to put into Moleskine. He filled several volumes.

I also aspired to think great thoughts and be thought of highly, so I followed suit after Bill and only got as far as a few idealistic entries about Atlas Shrugged.

Later in high school, I met my wife. Melissa is an avid journaler, so when I met her in my junior year of in high school, it inspired me to try again with a more earnest approach. So I wrote a few entries about life and love and quit once again, earnestly.

In college, I studied philosophy, and I bought several little Moleskines. (I recognize the preceding sentence as being redundant.) That time I managed fifteen pages of dense scrawl about Kant and Kierkegaard.

I’ve also tried Xanga, Livejournal, and even a Google Doc, but the only thing that improved by using those tools was the legibility. My name is Chuck, and I am a serial journal abandoner.

Modest Expectations

I’m posting this as my first entry on the personal side of this blog because it seemed a good way to test the waters. Usually, when I write a post for any blog, I am thinking through the subject matter as I write about it. How better to kick this off than with a meta-journal, a sort of ars poetica about writing a journal?

We’ll see how it goes from here. I’m not making promises to myself or to anyone else about what I write here or how often. Primarily, I wanted to have this channel of a personal blog available on the site so that I have a place for anything I could possibly want to write.

I don’t know what about my life might qualify as interesting to other people, so I won’t be paying too much attention to that. I’ll be writing whatever I’m interested in on this part of the site, and I’ll only be writing when the interest strikes me.

Writing this post has been fun, at least, and that’s an improvement over most of my previous attempts.

How do you end these things?

Test of the personal blog page.