Thoughts on Personal Writing

There are three main reasons for which I write about my experiences:
1) To vent about them (usually the frustrating/sad/upsetting ones)
2) To commemorate them (usually the new/positive/exciting ones)
3) To share my reflections with others on a unilateral basis (blog posts)

1) Venting
I currently don't keep a journal. I used to, when I was younger, and I attempted to when I was traveling last year. After re-reading some of my journal entries from a while back, I increasingly found that I only wrote about things when I was upset or lonely. I wrote about how I accidentally kind of killed my pet hamster. I wrote about the time when a boy in my fifth grade class won the public library's bookmark design contest instead of me. I wrote about how my host sister in France was actually teasing me about being impolite when I thought she was teasing me about saying something incorrectly. I wrote about the time this past February that I had a four-day-long mental breakdown due to exhaustion and failure.

I stopped wanting to write journal entries because I didn't want to relive those negative experiences when I reread them. Sometimes, though, it can be helpful to get it out on paper, because holding onto anger, frustration, sadness, etc. is exhausting.

2) Commemoration
While writing a journal entry about all the terrible stress I underwent those four days in February, I also made myself make a list of all the good things that had happened during that time, too: talking to one of my good friends at work, another friend's kind message, a really delicious salad, snowflakes, and more.

There were journal entries about the good things that have happened in my life, of course, and I enjoy looking over those. I wrote about winning the third grade class hamster (the same one that I accidentally kind of killed two years later). I wrote about how I won the public library's bookmark design contest in the seventh grade. I wrote about that time in France where my friend and I were getting hit on by two French "mecs" and we tried to get them to say "Can we have frog legs for dinner?" and "antidisestablishmentarianism" in English. I wrote about how much I like my boobs.

3) Reflections
Part of the reason why I titled this blog Profound Novelty was because of the nature of reflection. There's a certain wisdom to be found in everyday experiences that everyone can appreciate. This blog contains my reflections on the goings-on around me. (My other blog, Minor News Reports, serves a somewhat different purpose but it still contains ironic reflections on contemporary living.)

Another purpose of reflection is attempting to make sense of something that happened in the past. I have written about things that have happened to me and things that I have done in the past in the form of (unpublished and/or fictionalized) blog posts, poems, journal entries, scripts, podcasts...

As of recently, the posts I have drafted but not published for Profound Novelty all remain unpublished because of their contained negativity and too many personal details. I drafted three posts about anxiety in the last two weeks, and all of them were more or less titled "Good Things are Happening Except I have Anxiety." God must have been reading those drafts because things have miraculously worked themselves out. For example, as I was typing a fourth draft about the anxiety in my personal life taking over my academic life, someone who I had been avoiding/who had been avoiding me for the past three weeks after a fight messaged me out of the blue and we made up.  Frankly, that exchange took away most of my personal troubles and brought closure to the situation. It's amazing how being kind and reaching out to someone can do that.

 Much of my anxiety was also about the future. It was so hard to plan for when nothing was settled. That has been alleviated too: this summer I have an internship with a film distribution company in Los Angeles that I finally got my parents on board about, I have housing all figured out for next year, and I was awarded the privilege of being UNC Student Television's 2016-2017 Station Manager. It's really fulfilling to have all my hard work be recognized through leadership and development opportunities like these.

I'm not really anxious anymore. I am too tired, and there are so many more good things to focus on, like friends and exercise and adventure. Based on my own experience, I would advise writers of any personal medium to write from what they know -just get it out- but remember to focus on the things that have made them happy.