The meaning of journaling on notebook:

A room of your own away from the digital humming

12th june 1942, Amsterdam, it’s Anne Frank’s birthday. Her father takes her to a Jewish bookshop (they’re not allowed to shop anywhere else) to buy her a gift and she’s immediately drawn to an autograph book, with a red and white checkers cover and a lock, perfect, she thinks! She doesn’t know how to begin, how to ‘talk to herself’ at first, so creates an imaginary friend, Kitty. Already dreaming about her future readers, she hesitates if her interests would be appealing to someone other than herself, total strangers, but keeps on writing them anyway.

I question the meaning of writing a lot. All these crazy GenAI tools do it, they write better than humans in many ways functionally, but they don’t have our lived experience yet. This, this feeling of angst that I have right now whose details stay in my dozens of notebooks is foreign to any GenAI tools out there. If I record it on any digital platform, it will be used for training purposes for AI at some point; the moment I give it away my angst becomes public, I lose the inner voice of my mindbody, what makes me who I am.

Anne Frank’s diary was written to keep a record of her innocent life to begin with, boys, girls, love interests, family arguments, she poured her heart into its pages… Hiding from the Nazis in the secret annex in her father’s warehouse for 761 days; it then turned into the story of daily struggles and frustration including some joy and celebration of life, a refuge from the outside. It not only became the voice of a child who suffered deeply from the atrocities of the war but also the record of a time in history with unique reflections, challenges, betrayals, loyalty, she had a knack to tap into humanity amidst all these. After her father returned home following his liberation by the allied forces, he discovered not one but two diaries that she had kept. The red and white checkered one and another one written in the novel form, The Secret Annex. Anne died in March 1945 one month before the liberation of the camp. It took years for his father to manage to get her diary published but he did, first in Dutch and then in 1952 in English when the book began its own life with Anne’s precious and heartbreakingly short story.

Thankfully we don’t all live through atrocious times but we all have feeble memory, a terrible distraction happens to us all because of information onslaught. Three minutes of deep concentration at best, not remembering what we ate last night but all the details on how much it hurt when we fell off the apple tree at age five is common to us all. In addition to constant online assault our brains are exposed to, evolution cannot be expedited at will. Our long-term memories are formed through a process of consolidation, where neural pathways associated with a memory become stronger and more stable over time. Distant past had longer to consolidate, becoming more robust and easier to retrieve whereas the recent is fragile, susceptible to forgetting.

There’s still war and blockades, where some don’t have access to connection so all they can do is to write on anything that they can get their hands on. Yearning to be remembered and tell the story of how they lived, how they suffered, how they survived people write on anything. Journalism is hard, self-reporting is sometimes all you get to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes and hold accountable the people and the states who performed horrible acts.

And then there’s sickness, Alzheimer’s, dementia… except a few moments of lucidity where only that pig-headed distant past raises its head, everything else is cloudy.

There’s trauma; hiding the very moment that we’ve been hurt so much that our mindbody cannot cope with and buries it so deep that we don’t even remember it existed at all.

There’s loneliness, checking out of life, lack of stimuli and curiosity which atrophy our memory.

I always thought being able to forget is the most precious ability humans have. Can you imagine if we kept remembering that awful moment we were drunk and made inappropriate jokes about our neighbour, or the shame when we got caught uttering white lies, or when we shouted at our colleague completely unwarranted at the end of a long day at work when we were depleted, exhausted to the bone? Admittedly these may be mostly about how we felt, very hard to forget in reality but slightly brushed under the carpet to protect our dignity, sense of self-worth and sometimes our sanity in the case of trauma until it’s dealt with properly, healed and put to rest.

I learned the exact time of my birth from the marriage certificate of my parents, as my dad got so excited he recorded his first born’s first piece of history on the first paper he grabbed at the hospital (identity purposes maybe, who knows? analog times…). I have hundreds of photos recording my childhood too, still in a hard copy album. We travel the world everyday, we’re glued to our phones and constantly reminded of those wonderful memories everywhere we turn our head towards, from the tv screen, to laptops to digital assistants and yet printed sepia photos are somewhere in our houses bridging us to our family’s history. Many people digitalise them but sometimes you just want to ‘hold’ your story, like wanting to read a printed book, smudging it with chocolate or pouring your tears on it, or carrying placards in a protest defending democracy where it’s urgent to hurt your hands to remind yourself that you were there…

Writing on its own is liberating, writing on paper our most inner thoughts, experiences and feelings is restoring some of our history unadulterated, raw and 100% human. Besides, you never know what’s going to happen next; Eric Schmidt thinks the US and China will start bombing each other’s datacenters in the next five years if the race to super intelligence continues in its current form.