On Returning
There is a box in my apartment containing years of handwriting. Well, not quite years. Some notebooks peter out after twenty pages, others have gaps of months or years where I stopped and then resumed as if no time had passed. But the cumulative weight carries: observations I made at twenty-three about a relationship that seemed permanent and wasn't, lists of books from 2019 I meant to read and didn't, a single entry from 2021 that begins mid-thought as though the previous entry—dated 2018—had just ended.
I have been trying to understand what these notebooks are for.
For a long time I thought I knew. I built a business on knowing. I sold journals. Beautiful ones, hand-stitched and leather-bound. I taught workshops on the practice of private writing. I quoted Virginia Woolf: "The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments." I talked about neuroscience, about how the act of writing by hand activates different pathways than typing, about James Pennebaker's studies showing that expressive writing strengthens immune function and alleviates psychological distress.
I meant all of it. But somewhere in the fourth year of running that business, I noticed something had shifted. When I sat down to write in my own journal, some part of my attention was already narrating for an audience: this could be a workshop topic, this demonstrates the practice. I was performing privacy, which made privacy impossible.
So I closed the shop. I simply stopped restocking, stopped teaching, stopped talking about journaling as though I understood what it was for. I kept writing, but I stopped explaining. Eventually, I took it all offline.
What I found in that silence (read what I wrote right after my adult gap year) was not what I expected.
There is a passage in Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. In those remarkable letters he wrote to Franz Xaver Kappus between 1903 and 1908, he writes:
““I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.””
For thirty years I thought I journaled to capture what would otherwise be lost. To create a record, to hold onto the dissolving moments that make up a life. The dinner where I had that conversation, the walk where I noticed that particular quality of dawn’s light. These are gone, even though I wrote them down.
What remains is something stranger: I remember writing about them. The journal didn't preserve the experience. It created a second experience, the experience of trying to articulate the first experience, and that's what stayed.
This is what Annie Dillard meant, perhaps, when she wrote in The Writing Life: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." The writing was not ancillary to the living. It was part of the living, maybe the part that made the rest visible.
In the 1970s, neuroscientist Endel Tulving distinguished between two kinds of long-term memory:
Semantic memory (facts, concepts, knowledge abstracted from experience), and
Episodic memory (personal experiences, tied to specific times and places)
A decade later, he refined this further, identifying what he called "autonoetic consciousness," referring to the capacity to mentally travel through subjective time, to remember not just that something happened but what it felt like to be the self who experienced it.
Journaling, I think now, is a technology for creating autonoetic consciousness where it might not otherwise exist. When you write about your day, you're not recording what happened. You're creating the sensation of having been present to what happened, which is different. The past self becomes recoverable not because you captured her accurately but because you gave her a voice.
This explains something I've noticed rereading old journals: the entries I remember writing. I can recall sitting at that particular desk, using that particular pen, feeling that particular mood—those aren't always the entries about important events. They're the entries where I was most fully present to the act of writing itself. The journal captured the journaling, not the day.
A year ago I stopped teaching journaling workshops because I no longer knew what I was teaching. Now I think I'm beginning to understand, though understanding feels like the wrong word? It's more like recognition, the way you might recognise someone you've been walking beside for years without quite looking at their face.
The practice is not about memory. It's not about self-knowledge or emotional processing or any of the instrumental purposes I used to assign it. It's about something closer to what the poet Jane Hirshfield calls "the practice of attention." Not attention as a tool for accomplishing something else, but attention as its own form of devotion.
When I write in my journal now, I'm not trying to preserve or process or understand. I'm just trying to be present to the motion of my own consciousness long enough to see what it looks like rendered in sentences. Sometimes this reveals something. A pattern I hadn't noticed, a connection I hadn't made. More often it reveals only that I am here, now, thinking this particular sequence of thoughts that will dissolve as soon as I stop paying attention to them.
Which is enough. Maybe it's everything.
The shop I closed a year ago is returning, but differently. What you'll find here are tools. Notebooks, yes, but also what I've learned about why they matter and what they can't do. I'm not selling a practice. I'm sharing one, with all its gaps and failures and thirty years of accumulated uncertainty.
Each week I'll write about some aspect of this: what journaling reveals about memory and time and the strange persistence of consciousness. Not how to journal better, but what happens when you journal long enough to forget you're trying to do it well. Not tips or prompts, but the actual experience of thirty years of showing up to a blank page with varying degrees of presence and noticing what that slow accumulation has made visible.
This is for people who already journal badly, inconsistently, with long gaps and repetitive anxieties and occasional moments of clarity that don't add up to transformation. It's for people who suspect the practice matters but aren't sure why, who find most advice about journaling either too precious or too instrumental.
It's for people willing to live the questions.
The journals themselves are here too, if you need them. Not because they'll make you journal better. Just because sometimes you need a place to write, and it should be a place you don't hate looking at.
That's all I'm offering (for now): tools, and company in the uncertainty. If this resonated, subscribe below.
SINGAPORE
OCTOBER 2025