Journaling
Sep 17, 2023
Since around middle school or so, a lot of my latent energy has been directed at “wanting to be a girl”. This is a phrase that needs a lot of explanation. By the word “girl”, I don’t really mean an actual living girl, but some weird ideal derived from middle school and early high school, where I’d see girls at school or read about them in books, but I couldn’t really interact with them (I couldn’t really interact with boys either, except via embarrassing social relations where I always felt like I was in some lower class from everyone else, which perhaps explains where the fascination towards girls comes from). I didn’t really want to be a boy. I still don’t really want to be a boy (or whatever the grown up version of a boy is). I’m aware of phrases like “gender dysmorphia”, but I never really feel like that language was supposed to apply to me. I’ll be just as dissatisfied as a girl as I am being a boy, because most of the things I yearn for have nothing to do with gender itself, but with weird fantasies rooted in my particular social position when I was 13.
I’d known a couple girls in school that drew a lot and kept journals. Later in high school when I actually was able to have a few friends who were girls, there was someone with notebooks with Pokemon and cute creatures on them, who wrote everything in a flowery way, and filled her notes with doodles. I was extremely jealous of that. I also drew in the margins of my notes, but it was always so ugly. My handwriting is terrible. In 11th grade I finally forced myself to learn cursive, which took so long, and required me to write so slowly. I hoped that I could write in a cute flowery way too. But my cursive turned out to be as ugly as my print handwriting. I used pink and blue pens, but I always felt like this was some surface level bandaid more a soul empty of “cuteness”. If I really were “a cute boy”, then everything I touched would naturally become cute, I figured. The fact that even after putting effort into it it was still ugly meant that there was some inherit divide that would never be crossed.
When I got on the internet more seriously I encountered blogs that felt like the internet versions of that flowery writing that enticed me so much, or like the carefully curated journals with stickers on each page and little cartoon creatures drawn in the margins. They all seemed to be run by women. Later on I read essays about how the official history of the internet is written by men, and as such it focuses on “masculine” websites, and ignores the more creative side of the internet, dominated by women, which has its basis in “feminine” arts and crafts (like journaling) that predate the internet.
Joining neocities, I once again feel that inadequacy. All I have is a website with a black background, which is a metaphor for the emptiness of my soul. I have a section of my website that I call my journal, but what I’m doing here isn’t real “journaling”, as I romantically imagine it to be. I’m not creating a lovely world of my own that only I could understand, filled with the kind of cuteness our real world is lacking. I’m just accumulating cold white words and embedding them into infinite darkness.
I still haven’t figured out a solution to this problem.
As a sidenote, the profession of mathematics seems like it would be uniquely suited for that style of note-taking annotated by cuteness I envy so much. Math -- particularly pure math -- has a very deep culture of handwriting everything. If you go to any kind of conference, 9/10 of the talks will use chalkboards over powerpoints. In 2023, a large proportion of students in any department will type notes on their laptops, except for math, where you might see some people writing on iPads, but virtually no one will be typing. This is because in math there are a lot of symbols and a lot of diagrams. Math has a very tumultuous relationship with traditional writing. You can’t just describe math. You need 2d pictures with arrows pointing out of all the letters, or weird venn-diagram-like charts acting as schematics of unimaginable geometric objects. The problem is those always end up seeming kind of ugly. I wonder if there’s a way to make them as cute as cartoon caterpillar crawling up the stalk of a flower? or at least as cute as some bulbous rodent-like creature crouching on the ground, moments before leaping into the air?