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narrativisation
May. 22nd, 2020 07:19 pmone tendency of mine that i've been noticing especially much in the past few weeks is trying to impose some kind of narrative logic onto periods of my life. i'll backtrack a little to properly explain what i mean: i've been keeping a diary for six years now in physical notebooks. each of those notebooks has a start date and an end date (although both are to some extent random and arbitrary, depending on the number of pages in each given notebook and on how many pages i use per day). add to that the fact that i give each volume a name, which should ideally reflect the contents of the volume.
sometimes things work out nicely, like the Finals Diary which covers both my high school final exams and the biology olympiad national finals, and sometimes they don't, like the Erasmus Diary which covers about 60% of my Erasmus period plus a roughly equal time before that. and sometimes a diary covers a period that isn't marked by anything noteworthy, and i don't do anything unusually creative with that diary, so i end up with something abstract like Unfolding Diary (a vague reference to unspecified personal development).
the thing that annoys me is that the periods covered by each volume don't necessarily coincide with noticeably distinct or marked periods of my life. life doesn't follow narrative logic. at best, i can choose what to focus on or how to decorate each diary to set it apart from the others. but here's the thing: the "flavour" of my memories from each period ends up being coloured by the diary that covers it. so a certain kind of temporal segmentation does end up being imposed all the same.
sometimes things work out nicely, like the Finals Diary which covers both my high school final exams and the biology olympiad national finals, and sometimes they don't, like the Erasmus Diary which covers about 60% of my Erasmus period plus a roughly equal time before that. and sometimes a diary covers a period that isn't marked by anything noteworthy, and i don't do anything unusually creative with that diary, so i end up with something abstract like Unfolding Diary (a vague reference to unspecified personal development).
the thing that annoys me is that the periods covered by each volume don't necessarily coincide with noticeably distinct or marked periods of my life. life doesn't follow narrative logic. at best, i can choose what to focus on or how to decorate each diary to set it apart from the others. but here's the thing: the "flavour" of my memories from each period ends up being coloured by the diary that covers it. so a certain kind of temporal segmentation does end up being imposed all the same.
