If someone asked me to write a book about my college years, I’d have to invent about half of it.
It isn’t because I have a shortage of interesting experiences, it’s because I’ve forgotten so many of the smaller details of the past two years. Writing a good book would be nearly impossible with the material I have. My book would be a tragically short and vague read.
Looking back, one freshman year floor dinner blends into the next, and the conversations attached to those meals fade into the hazy background of memory. The names of professors I particularly liked are forgotten. Parties I went to are reduced to a warm and fuzzy feeling conjured up by photos on Facebook.
So, in the hopes of enriching my story with greater detail for future reading, I’m going to start writing in a journal. I want something concrete to remember my days here at UCLA. I want my hypothetical book to be a good one.
The greatest stories in literature are the ones that can take a snapshot of a life and make us feel as though we’ve lived it. We identify with these individual characters and we live through their experiences, often in the most minute detail. We don’t just read what the characters do, we feel what they feel.
As super-active college students with parties to go to, classes to sleep though, sporting events to attend and midterms that often start as early as third week, we tend to breeze through our educational careers without taking much of a look back. But these college years are too packed with awesome, worth-remembering-every-detail kinds of experiences to simply let them fly by.
Like eating banana pancakes at a diner in Santa Monica. My friends and I, especially desperate for something to do on a Sunday night, decided to venture down the avenue for this sweet treat only to find ourselves stranded due to a bus schedule that wasn’t very conducive to late-night travel. The rather expensive taxi ride home made that particular evening a little pricier than any of us would have liked, but it also proved to be one of those experiences that provided talking points for months to come.
In general, college is full of the themes that make our lives a page-turning read: There are unexpected occurrences, self-discovery, friendships, love, heartbreak, challenges, success, failure and a plethora of other dramatic subjects.
But all of this is put to waste if we can’t flesh out our stories with meaning and feeling. Our histories will seem meaningless without details to accompany them.
And therein lays the importance of journaling: preserving our personal history. I figure, if I can journal every day, or once a week, or even once a month, I will be recording the details that will make my history worthwhile and will make it easier for my future self to look back and reexperience these years.
Asked about the importance of journal-writing in preserving the past, sociology professor Zsuzsa Berend said, “(Journaling) helps us to understand people’s internal realities, how they saw themselves within reality … We can see that they didn’t always see the world the way we do.”
Journaling is our chance to preserve our unique perspective. The internal reality that Professor Berend mentioned is as much alive in us as it was in journal writers of the past, and it’s just as important. Perhaps by writing in a journal we can come to a better understanding of the individuals we are today, and hopefully improve the individuals we will become tomorrow.
As a result of this journaling, I hope my dinnertime conversations can be appreciated, my favorite professors dutifully remembered and those Facebook photos placed within a context that will truly mean something. That way when I look back years from now, I can return to UCLA and remember what I was really like in this moment.
Hopefully, the details in my journal will transform my UCLA story from a simplistic children’s book into the fleshed-out novel that all our stories actually are. And hopefully, I will no longer have to make half of it up.