I piecemealed together this website about journaling under a completely different name back in 2022. After 16 years of inconsistent blogging, I was burned out and ready to give up. AI copywriting was very new to most people, and the question at the time was whether AI could be harnessed to write all the content for an entire site and turn that site into a money maker.
Well, I tried it, and I failed. Or we failed. Whichever.
Turns out, although I love writing in journals and preserving memories for future generations, I hate selling journals and pens. I don’t like commercializing the thing I love doing. I was creating commercial content about a thing I love in a non-commercial way.
Bad news.
I blame Gary Vee. I took his evangelistic message about just picking a thing you love and creating content around it, and I tried to commercialize my love of journaling. Okay, that might not have been the approach Gary recommended, but it’s the approach I took.
The entire value of the practice of journaling is that it’s mine and it’s unseen. Turning it into content requires either violating that privacy or writing around the private core with generic filler – and I’ve tried the second and watched it go flat.
So what will we talk about?
I don’t love the brands or the pens, per se. I’m basic and simple. I find meaning in things.
And that last sentence is the REAL subject. The journals were never the topic. They were the object my actual topic attaches to. “I find meaning in things” – in objects, in acts, in permanence, in being known versus staying hidden – that’s a subject I can write about in public without giving away a single journal entry.
I’ve been told that it’s possible to write endlessly about why I journal, what I’m afraid of losing, what it means to leave writing behind for children who may or may not read it . . . and never once expose what’s on my private journal page.
Perhaps this is an essay project about meaning, permanence, and privacy that got mislabeled as a journaling blog because a journal was the nearest object.
The domain name I chose, “A Self Observed”, was a turn of phrase from C.S. Lewis’ famous book, A Grief Observed. Lewis’ book was intensely personal exposure of his own raw grief and questions after the death of his wife. Perhaps (subconsciously) this website was always destined to become a book about processing grief, loss, desire, hope, and idealism.
These words won’t write themselves. Now I guess the question remains: Will I?
If we’re going to press forward, then this likely becomes a handful of real essays a year about finding meaning in permanent things, published under a name that already means exactly that. No AI carrying it. No brand roundups. No pretending I love forty different pens. Just the one thing I actually love, written from the side of it I’m willing to show.
