Five years

• March 12, 2020: Corona Craziness
• November 7, 2020: President-Elect Biden
• January 6, 2021: Insurrection
• March 13, 2021: Day 365
• March 17, 2021: “Be careful ladies. It’s St. Patrick’s Day and everyone in Ireland is an asshole today.”
• April 19, 2022: First day at USU
• February 25, 2023: State Champions!
• November 6, 2024: That did not turn out as I had hoped. 

These are actual entries from my five-year one line a day journal, which I completed on December 31, 2024. The journal was a gift from my sister for Christmas 2019, and instead of just leaving it on my shelf to look pretty, which maybe a normal person would have done, I made it a point to write something in that journal every single day. And I did exactly that, every day for five years. Some of what I wrote in this journal no longer makes sense to me, and some of it is straight-up illegible because my handwriting is dreadful, but most of it is a truthful record of something that was happening in my life or in the world, or something that I was thinking about on that particular day, or something that made me laugh. 

*****

I used to have a really outstanding memory. I could recall with near perfect accuracy exactly what happened on a specific date a year ago or five years ago; and not just major occurrences but mundane trivial stuff like this was that day last year when we were all hyped up for sushi and then we showed up and found out that the restaurant was closed on Mondays, or this was the day in 2012 when I got that really terrible haircut. Even my husband - even my siblings! - acknowledged my superior memory. And I still remember most things pretty well but I'm not the failsafe memory machine that I once was. I need to keep records. I need to write stuff down. So if I didn't keep this five-year diary, I wouldn't have remembered the days when I recorded over 25,000 steps, or what day it was when when I got pulled over for driving on a Navy base in an unregistered car, or when it was that I dropped that jar of spaghetti sauce in the garage because I keep finding tiny little spots of sauce, years after I cleaned that mess up. 

*****

Just after Christmas, I was hanging around in a Barnes and Noble, and I almost bought a new one line a day journal. Let's do this again, I thought. But I already keep a planner and I already write this silly thing and how much more can I document my already pretty well documented life? I’m glad I have this little record of the five-year period from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2024 but it was a bit of a chore. I stuck with it for five years, and that was the point. On to the next thing.