Last Page Day

It comes approximately every 192-ish days. Though usually a bit longer, because I’m not yet daily-consistent. I haven’t had that streak yet.

But it’s the day I write on the last page of my current Moleskine notebook. The last entry before that book gets pulled from my nifty leather sheathe and stored in the cigar box I’ve co-opted for that purpose. Last Page Day is a bitter-sweet ceremony, wherein I usually write some self-aware observation about my journey over the past few months, about journaling and its impact on my life, about what’s changed and what’s remained the same for me in that time.

When we were doing van life full time, traveling the country, I would end up marveling at all the places I’d been over the past 192 days. It was a big list.

And for sure, I’ve traveled while writing this particular journal. Some of that travel has even resulted in profound realizations and changes for me. This is one of the reasons it’s good to keep a journal, and keep it consistently.

Journaling has done some profound, positive things to my brain, and to my life.

Years ago, even into my  junior years, journaling felt daunting and heavy. I wanted to keep a journal. I wanted to have a record of who I was, a place to put my private thoughts. I probably wasn’t quite thinking of it in such sophisticated terms, but I wanted that anyway.

I have some journal entries from that period of my life—I think as young as maybe seven or eight years old. It’s hard to tell, because when I think about that period in my life I almost invariably decide I was eight, for some reason. Eight-years-old was a very important benchmark in my life.

I’m pretty sure I was in second grade when I got my first “diary,” though, so it tracks. And that diary was a commercially created book, sold at a school book fair. What we would call a “low content book” today. It was essentially one long calendar with blank lines for me to fill in my thoughts, and a few writing prompts in case I got stuck. I still have it.

My entries in that diary are cute, and melodramatic, and mostly about being in love with a girl named Beverly. And a girl named Nancy. And other girls, whose names I don’t currently remember... you know, I was quite the young romantic.

Later years, older years, I tried the journal thing again. I have record books and spiral notebooks. I had a “Fat Lil’ Notebook” that I actually kept up quite well for a long time. And as we get older still, I had some “real” journals, leather-bound things in which I scribbled all sorts of stuff. I experimented with style and content. I skewed religious in some, and very secular in others. Some entries were long, rambling, freeform streams of consciousness. Some were very organized and precise.

But none were consistent.

There were so many entries that started with, “Well, I haven’t written in this journal for a really long time. I’m going to change that.” And then two years would go by and I’d write another, almost identical entry.

Of course, in those two years I might have started other journals. I’ve done a lot of “digital journaling” over the years. I have tons of files with extensions like TXT and WPS and DOC—some of these contain quite a bit of writing.

I was not consistent, in that I did not write daily. But I did write often, and usually a lot.

Those journals count. I don’t give myself enough credit, but they count.

Having those journals as a record of my life is pretty amazing. But I think that the value of a journal goes way and well beyond that. For one, if you can get into a daily habit of it, a journal is a profoundly good place to practice the craft of writing. If you treat a journal as a respected place, as a means of practicing and honing your craft, you may be a writer.

Journals are also a means for me to clear my head. They’re a release for all the things that run through my brain constantly—an outlet for ideas and turns of phrase and speculations that I’m not necessarily ready to share with the world. I can safely (I have to assume) drop all that stuff into the pages of a Moleskine, or the pixels of something like the Day One app, and come back to them later to tinker and perfect them. Or, in some cases, reject them. Sometimes I have thoughts or ideas that aren’t worthy.

And that’s a good point to discuss. Because a journal really should be a safe place.

We’re not always righteous, all the time. Sometimes we think unworthy thoughts. Sometimes we have vile thoughts and feelings that shouldn’t be expressed out loud. We should always feel safe to put those into a journal, without worrying about what someone would think if they ever found it.

Because what we write is not necessarily who we are. That’s a mistake a lot of people make. I see it all the time on social media. The judgement of someone for what they’ve written or said, as if their words are their selves—that shouldn’t exist.

It’s far better to write that in private, where it can first be expressed and then analyzed. Where the writer can determine whether those words do or do not accurately represent themselves.

I guess I’m saying, if someone ever finds and reads my journals, know that not every thought that ever came out of my head and made it onto the page is one I believe. That’s kind of the point.

Journals help us sort the “us” from the “not us.” They help us expel the demons. They help us refine our true nature.

They should never be weaponized against the writer. Especially not by the writer themselves.

Don’t judge yourself too harshly for the words that come out of your brain. Sometimes we say awful and hideous things to ourselves, because we’re testing it. We’re trying it out, pushing and poking at it, to try to work out how to defeat it.

Journaling is an empowering tool for shaping how we think and who we are, and improving on both.