Journal? Burn all!
Who is this "Chris T."?
One month exactly since my last journal entry. The previous one was a month before that. Stretches between entries grow wider. Why? Since I began logging my inner thoughts, around the age of 17, I’d often end the day with a few paragraphs about its ups and downs. Now it’s increasingly rare. Is the newsletter to blame?
If you haven’t been with it awhile, my newsletter See You Next Tue! (SYNT)) recently took a vastly different form. Lifting entries from my journal, I’d edit them for public consumption, then lay out my entire week chronologically. There was a newsletter meltdown not long ago, centered on my dual demons: TMI and TL:DR (two comments I’d hear repeatedly? I thought we were speaking in confidence and It’s too long). I’d allowed SYNT to become an insatiable content furnace demanding to be fed… but the more black coal of my being shoveled in, the hotter it ran, until oversharing and ever-growing lengths exploded it. I took a hiatus, recalibrated, abandoned the whole confessional That Was My Week approach and began to think of SYNT’s central piece as existing somewhere between an op-ed and one of those extemporaneous rants that open Aerial View. But my journal discipline was collateral damage. Absent the fast-track of repurposing entries for the newsletter, the daily ritual tapered off. I know I’ll regret it. To borrow a descriptor from my friend Chris Butler, my journal is The Museum of Me, its personal archaeology delivering an immediacy hard to mine via memory alone. Time-traveling into old journal entries, I glean long-forgotten Chris details and often wince over what seemed so weighty in the moment, AKA What the FUCK was wrong with you?!
A recent op-ed in The New York Times may also explain why my journal entries grow infrequent. In her essay, a woman with cancer agonizes over whether to keep or destroy her diary, the only first-person record of her life. To negate it is to erase herself. We all face oblivion, so what does it matter if we’re reevaluated when we’re gone? But she can’t bear the thought of leaving her “shit” behind for loved ones to excavate, worried the new information will erode their vision of her. I can relate. I’m mortified in advance knowing anyone trolling through page-after-page of my daily triumph and tragedy can’t help but reframe me. So, to blunt any future shock for those who’ll read my “shit” and wonder Who WAS he?!, here are my journal’s overarching motifs (some of which you’ll recognize from See You Next Tue!):
Childhood. Me, endlessly trying to figure out how it all went wrong in my family. Why all the violence? Why did my father effectively disown me, claiming repeatedly that another man was my dad? Why, after the divorce, did my mother prioritize her boyfriend (my supposed real father) and their shared love of booze over her kids? Why were my brothers not at all interested in being brotherly? Why did my sisters have a seemingly easier time growing up and getting out? Were my grandmother and aunt (who wasn’t a blood relation and confessed to loving my grandmother) the only relations who kept my childhood from being an unmitigated disaster? How does the trauma of what I lived through fuel my guitar player and the formation of the Nihilistics? And how does it continue to play out in fractured family relationships today?
Self-loathing. Holy shit. Nary a kind word for myself. How I made it so far without jumping in front of a train is beyond me (though self-destruction is an ongoing topic). The self-hatred is epic, largely based around paralysis over my weight. So many abandoned attempts at dieting, at exercise, at “doing something.” So much dream-casting, wanting to wake up and be thin, longing to know what it would be like to not be hampered by my appearance. Endlessly hoping I’ll meet someone to accept me as I am even if I can’t. How I escaped being an Incel before there were Incels is a minor miracle.
Romantic failures. Sweet Jesus, the list of women I hit on haphazardly, pursuing even those who did little more than be kind to me! I was so lonely, horny and desperate the disappointment I brought down on myself trying to convert female acquaintances and friends into something more is soul-crushing. Again and again I fail to properly read signals, hoping to win over some winsome lass with my personality and wit, knowing it’s doomed to end in failure and the oft-heard phrase I’m not interested in you in that way. There are a few successes but I bungle them and give up on the idea of ever finding “the one” by the time I meet Sweet T., thereby proving some maxim about not trying, etc. Hey, at least I was in the game swinging the bat, eh?
Financial struggles. The late fees. The utilities turned off. The loans from friends, family, employers, often paid back late or incompletely. I just can’t seem to figure out how to support myself until I luck into a steady job with room to advance (PaperDirect), then slowly move into a radio career.
You’re dead to me. Friends, letting me down over and over, abandoned because they can’t meet my strict codes of friendship. The bodies begin to pile up and one wonders when I’ll realize Maybe it’s me? It takes a long fuckin’ while.
Radio. So much writing about what was once the nexus of my existence and the font from which all post-Long Island good/bad flowed. Moving to New Jersey in 1986 and meeting the Hoboken crew my first night as a resident kick-starts my life. Kaz gets me on WFMU and within three years I’ve launched Aerial View. On the air, all the threads come together: my comfort performing; my telemarketing career; my ironic, sarcastic dark-black sense of MAD magazine/Monty Python humor and my burgeoning interest in politics. Even on a radio career ascent I agonize over every WFMU connection, wondering if I’ll ever be as loved or make as much Marathon money as so-and-so. There’s also a horrifying amount of writing about my 16 years with Sirius (SiriusXM, post-merger), a period when I’d go on endlessly about travails at work, conflicts between me and my co-host, my near-crippling impostor syndrome, etc. The mental anguish is a wonder to behold.
Therapy. AKA The Thing That Saved Me. I initially got into counseling in the late 1980s. I’d hit a wall and couldn’t figure out how to go on. My doctor prescribed Zoloft but was smart enough to suggest talk therapy too. It morphed into couples counseling but the girlfriend and the Zoloft are long gone and three shrinks later I’m still at it, spending 50 minutes each week navigating my inner dialogue with an experienced guide.
That’s the bulk of it. Maybe this chewing over the subject of journals will inspire me to get back into a daily practice. Or will that just be more to burn?