What were you doing in the third week of January? Still recovering from exam season, perhaps? Fighting the January Blues one day at a time? Forcing yourself to workout for just one more week so you can say you stuck to your New Years Resolution for at least a month? I, for one, went to a society ball and consequently experienced the real-time onset of a hangover at my 9am seminar (perfectly balanced, as all things should be). I can also tell you that somebody watched Marty Supreme and rated it 4.5 stars, someone else wrote a love letter to āSā, and Juliette went to the dentist and hated it. Livingwithjuliette is a page on Instagram that posts short weekly diary entries for her followers to see. Usually only a few lines long, each day comes with a reflection, or a small event or interaction that she experienced. The account caught my eye a few months ago because of how simple and relatable it was. She would write about pretending not to see someone you know on the street and parcel deliveries being the highlight of her day. More interestingly, though, she has turned a single page into a platform for many with her new project where people can anonymously submit their own diary entries to be posted. With the idea of ābuilding a villageā resurfacing on social media, collective journaling looks like a productive step closer to this goal.
Although I have seen many advocates for journaling, a part of me cannot help but be skeptical. Yes, it is a fantastic way to iron out wrinkled, bunched up thoughts and is a well-known coping mechanism for stress. Yet, there always seems to be a fine line between reflecting on oneās day and getting lost in over-analysing your innermost self, at least for the āthought-daughtersā. The question of when self-care/time spent with yourself becomes self-absorption is one that keeps coming up, as does a murkiness of framing larger world events through your own experience. In other words, journaling, as I see it, is projecting your thoughts and feelings onto a page, and typically, it is to alleviate or make sense of volatile emotions. In todayās world, however, politics is often the reason why we feel so overwhelmed. When the āglobal-politicalā becomes personal, how do you ensure that you donāt write yourself into the role of a victim? For example, I often feel consumed by the new statistics about killings in America or the genocide in Gaza, but cannot write about this āfeelingā of anxiety without the ebbing thought: Who am I to write about how I feel in this situation whilst safely sat 3000 miles away, and at times in a country that acts more like the oppressor than the oppressed? I do not know the solution to this conundrum, but of course, I know it isnāt the correct approach: the entire point of journaling is to depict your true experiences and thoughts. However, it is an apprehension that this Instagram account has helped reframe through a different style of journaling.Ā
Livingwithjuliette simplified journaling, stripping it back to basics. Instead of taking a psychoanalytical approach to events and feelings, the shorter entries focus on capturing the mood of the day. The inherent awkwardness of human interactions are described but not delved into, taking the pressure and baggage off of writing and what it means. This refreshing approach to journaling which just shows glimpses into the mind has helped me get back into the habit (albeit sporadically) and embrace the original benefits of the activity – reflection, mindfulness and creating rather than consuming. Jotting down a stand-out moment every day also forces you to step away from the stereotype of only journaling when feeling ābadā, and results in a journal – like Julietteās – that also has its fair share of humour and whimsy. Eventually, this approach could aid navigating through the more complex dilemma of placing yourself politically in your own writing.
Her new project that adds anonymous diary entries to her page has also been a ray of sunshine in a dull climate. Reading strangersā day-to-day lives, from their ācrash-outsā on page to their Lady Whistledown-esque retellings of gossip, has been an unexpected solution to a growing feeling of disconnect in the community. While it can be argued that learning about random peopleās lives is a waste of time and ābrain spaceā, what we can gain from this information makes it valuable. Right now, āAI Slopā, a term coined to describe low-quality content made by AI, has infected the internet. Its symptoms are showing themselves everywhere – from fake influencers to fake food to fake voiceovers to fake art – and make themselves inescapable. Gradually, as it is getting harder and harder to discern the authentic from the curated, our sense of human connection is being threatened. So, in these moments, small grass-roots projects like this can help garner a community better than any large-scale project. The simple act of sharing human experience with one another and relating together – all the comments are along the lines of how eerily similar the diary content is to their own entries – is becoming an unexpected resistance to Artificial Intelligence. It creates a space for the awkward, messy and often unexplainable human experience to flourish – something AI cannot and does not need to do. Considering Descartesā famous āI think therefore I amā philosophy in the context of journaling, one can ask if we have begun transitioning into an āI write therefore I amā economy, where the excess of āthinkingā is remedied via the written word and where journals become proofs of authenticity. If so, could collective journaling take this further and turn āI amā into āwe areā? If we write together, can we finally become one?