Journal hoarder: why I keep an onsite and offsite journal.

By Quinn M. A - January 19th 2024

So, as the title says, I like to keep an offsite journal aside from this one, and I wanted to take this webdiary entry to explain the reasons why I do that. I’ve always been encouraged to journal by my mother, especially when I was in middle school and having a lot of mental health issues. I, being a dumb 13 year old, decided that I would not be doing that and instead vent on tumblr and discord. I am now a much less dumb older teenager, and don’t use tumblr aside from my webcomic (out of choice. Quitting tumblr has been really good for my anxiety!), and also don’t use discord much (not really out of choice, just stopped using it much out of habit.), and instead, keep two journals!

Some people might say two journals is a lot, but the two serve very different purposes for me. The offsite, physical journal is where I put all my fun hangout and date plans, and a lot of the messy stuff. This webdiary is where I make some jokes about my family members or something, and write about why I’m a furry. Basically this diary is meant to be a very professional writing showcase! Ok, not really, but it’s still a lot less personal than my physical journal, the content of which I would probably only share with my brother, partner, and my grandma.

I like to think of this webdiary as being like a pen name, except the writing itself is a pen name. And I guess I use one of those too so you can’t track me down or whatever. It’s never gonna be everything about my life, but it’s some bits and pieces, some of my passion, some of my life, some of my problems, but never all of them–that’s reserved for my physical journal. I think this is a good balance to have for myself personally.

Like I mentioned earlier, I quit tumblr pretty recently, and I think in a lot of ways, tumblr was what kept me from keeping this kind of journal as well as a physical journal. It was my only journal, but all of my passion, all of my life, and all of my problems might as well have been in it. There was no balance at all! And quite frankly I’m uncomfortable with any old stranger being able to look at my impulsive middle school ramblings…But I’m glad to have a real balance now, just sharing some bits of my life publicly here, and keeping the rest to myself and my journal. The effort I have to put into uploading a diary entry to this site is also a good barrier to me writing something impulsive about my mental health.

Anyways, I know no one was probably really all that interested in hearing me talk about tumblr-blogging and writing diary entries, but I thought it’d be nice to get my feelings about this on (digital) paper!

Thanks for reading once again!