Do you keep a diary?

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The closest I come to a diary is keeping a log of the date and time I take important medications such as blood thinner.

I've always thought it would be neat to keep an diary or journal, but realistically, I'd spend hours writing and rewriting, and then rewriting.
That is if I every thought of anything to write in it.
When I was a kid (5-9), I use to think would be neat to write my grandmother, and then get a letter back. But I could never think of anything to say to her. My mom said "Tell her what you did today, or this week." I thought she would be bored by that. So I never wrote my grandmother a letter.
Writing a diary or journal would be like that.

I keep a diary. I like to write down my thoughts without any filter. My friends were curious about it and read it a little, and started to call my diary a cursed book lol.

I've tried writing diaries, it's always been a bit on/off/off/off... never for a sustained period of time.
I make notes about exercises, how many reps/sets I've done, notes about skills I'm trying to learn, personal bests, struggles, frustrations, how I've failed, etc.
I think if I kept a diary I could spend all day on it, and it would end up being a diary about me writing diaries!

I did it once during my freshman year of college during Spring Semester 1976 during a particularly rough time in my life. I have had no desire to write one before or since. At the time, diaries and self-reflection in general were thought of as girl things. I guess social media and Wrong Planet are sort of diaries.

A couple of years ago, as we were cleaning up the house I grew up in and it popped up. It was not a diary book, but pages ripped out of a notebook and put in a folder. I never wrote dear diary. I thought I had remembered most of what happened. I was shocked to find out I had forgotten about 90 percent of it. Reading a first person account of my life at age 18 was surreal. It was shocking to read myself describing mental illnesses I believed I had. I had no idea I used that type of language. It was mostly a painful read, but not all of it. It was shocking to read how much I self-advocated, even just walking into the dean’s office one day. It did not work out, but at least I gave it the old college try(pun intended). Weather has always been a special interest of mine, so it brought a smile to my face to read my daily weather updates. There were more mundane things I had forgotten about. In one entry, I was rating the local eateries whose names I had forgotten.

I reminded myself that these events occurred almost 50 years ago, and I’m still here. Of course, I wonder if I should have kept a diary more often. The Fall 1975 semester was possibly worse. The 5th through 8th grades were also pretty bad. Of course, I am curious about what bad things I have forgotten about. OTOH, maybe those things should stay buried. I’ll never know.

^ I had a similar experience a few months ago when I found an old journal during the process of moving. I didn’t remember writing it. It’s pretty bad and I’m still grappling with it to be honest. It only covers a couple weeks, so I also wonder what else I don’t remember/fully remember. Maybe I’d rather not know at this point.

I do like to write, but I don’t think I’ll keep a traditional journal again.

Writing it is one of those things I do remember from that time because it was so atypical of me. After being diagnosed and going through the process of reevaluating my life through the new lens I did have a desire to look at it but never tried looking for it. I figured it was tossed decades ago.

And what about your DREAM diaries? I would love to start one if not this horrible insomnia that prevents me from having dreams I have one superthick free journal (600 pages) and I could start my dream diary in it but no, I don't have practically any dreams now

And this year, it is going to turn 8

The most interesting thing I described in it recently, was that publishing proposal I got a month ago

At first, I am always writing my entries typing them down in the Word files and it is later on when I write them down in my diary

I think the most interesting diary volume of mine was the second one out of those three - it was the veritable diary of the plague year like in Defoe's book - with this diference that in my case it was Covid and not the Black Death

I think that the diary is going to be kept by me in the same notebook for like the next two years so I need to wait for the next notebook for quite a long time - for soooo long I started the volume several days before the English Queen's death, the diary entry in which I mentioned her passing, is the second entry in this very volume.