I was never good at keeping a diary. The closest I got was a few years' worth of bullet journals; Covid deftly sank that endeavour. But I can recall getting a journal when I was about twelve or so. For some reason it's linked in my mind to my grandmother's house; I suspect it was a Christmas present I brought over for our annual Christmas evening meal.
I remember writing something in it; I was aiming to preserve the legacy of a deep-thinking twelve-year-old, but in the end wrote something to the effect of "nothing profound yet."
As for him, so for me; over the decades I have begun blogs, gotten a few posts in, and abruptly stopped. I have started numerous journals, and have equally failed to fill them. And I worried that this was yet one more iteration of said pattern.
There is nothing wrong (I consistently tell myself) with abandoning these projects; equally those who write blogs/keep journals and suchlike are not inherently better than those who don't (no offense to the blogs that have been maintained over the years). Nevermind the stacks of library shelves filled with correspondence and diaries and personal notes from my predecessors.
I have sometimes wondered about all those nameless people from millennia past whose thoughts have not been preserved. Why would I feel like the witterings in my mind deserve any more legacy than them? A dark thought, perhaps, but one that has continually challenged me. It sits alongside the memory of running up to an empty stage to babble into a microphone. I wanted to speak, I wanted to be heard and seen. Obviously I should keep a record of my thoughts.
I didn't speak properly until I was three. Next to the room where I penned those anti-profound observations 30+ years ago sits the dining room. It was there that my patient grandma sat with me, holding an apple that I wanted but keeping it from me until I learned how to voice the word. She waited, and I whined. But eventually I spoke.
So maybe I'll keep writing, and speaking, for her.