How I Keep Track
I explore my early journey as someone who documents
As part of my personal reckoning with aging, being an adult, and Not Wanting to Die Due to Overthinking, I have become someone who documents.
In many ways, this is my return to the Type A headspace that ruled my elementary school days. Example: In second grade, I walked so fast to the bathroom, to the water fountain, as the line leader, to recess, from recess, etc., that my teacher once told me, ‘Karl you’re always rushing everywhere — I bet you’ll be a surgeon one day!’
Do surgeons rush everywhere? Are they thinking, ‘gotta get to my 12p heart surgery so let’s speed up this 11a vasectomy, interns’ all the time? I am not sure. Point is, my neuroticism has been well-documented, dating back to the early aughts.
Not to worry, though, as my newfound appreciation for documentation comes from a good place and has had pleasant, soothing effects. When I keep track, archive, log, chronicle, record, file — I expand my ability to cherish. What previously would exist in a fuzzy corner room of a random daydream can now live in a more tangible, accessible place, giving me the ability to build stronger, more vivid, more emotional memories.
Now that I am deepening my connection to my own lived experience, I am feeling more and more like a real person with a real personal history. And it’s those small, but oh-so-important habits that can lead to wonderful things, like Not Wanting to Die Due to Overthinking.
MY DOCUMENTATION INVENTORY
Google Maps
For saving places I’ve been to, whether while blacked out on the LES at 2 a.m. as a 22-year-old with no queer friends or while on a reading date with my boyfriend at a cafe with astounding cortados last weekend. Also for bookmarking places I want to go, like this half-demolished Gothic church-turned-museum in Lisbon.
Google Calendar
For remembering that I need to text that new friend in three weeks to hang out when we’re both less busy, for penciling in a dinner plan, for sculpting a three-day itinerary in a new destination, for adding ‘get fitted for new running shoes’ to my next-next weekend’s To Dos.
Strava
For logging each run I go on, tracking every hundredth of a mile trekked and how fast, slow, or medium-style I ran it. Had a wonderful return to it last week after two terrible months of letting a pesky stress fracture heal.
Letterboxd
For having a way to answer ‘what’s your favorite movie?’ I am bad with favorites in general, but favorite movie is especially tough due to my strong emotional connection to movies, which makes it feel like a betrayal every time I give just one film in my answer.
Notes App
For random lists that I’ll never need but have to go somewhere, grocery shopping, strategizing a better version of me based on the half-baked wisdom of a drunk person at a party, subway thoughts that I’ll never need but have to go somewhere, ideas for a TV show that I’ll get around to writing in 2059.
Vivino
For rating wines that I drink.
NYT Cooking
For saving recipes that look tasty, yet easy enough for an unsupervised 10-year-old to be able to make.
I will spend an hour on Google Maps now. I will get out of bed at 3 am because I remembered that one bar I went to with that one boy in 2018 who I convinced myself I was in love with because he smiled at me a certain way one time, and I have to save it to my Google Maps before I forget. And then that makes me think of the places I would frequent when I first moved to NYC over four years ago, and then I’ll want to save them all in that very moment, because the mind is slinky and evasive and those memories could be gone for weeks if I don’t capture them now.
And then I’ll remember that a movie I really loved was filmed near that one restaurant, and hmm, did I save that on Letterboxd yet? No, I didn’t, now I need to look it up and give it my rating and decide if I want to also write a review, and then I’ll spend 30 minutes trying to remember all of the movies that I’ve seen that remind me of the first movie I thought of, and then log all of them before I forget them. I am usually lazy and give up on arduous tasks that require thinking, but once my brain starts to whir, it feels inhumane to ignore it.
When I have a bottle of wine, I take a picture and upload it to Vivino, where I rate it out of five stars. The app will say something like, ‘Congrats, you’ve rated your first Oregon Riesling!’ and I will literally feel joy. I’m reminded that I am a real person with an opinion and a certain taste profile, and I’ve had three different kinds of Chiantis, which are named after the Chianti region of Tuscany, Italy, BTW, and for a brief moment, I feel cultured and traveled and just a little bit more interesting than I thought I was.
I recently became a Google Calendar person due to being 26 and I felt I needed to grow the fuck up. Being a Google Calendar person means you take charge of your weeks, you’re a bulldog, and you’re a star!!! Previously, the entirety of my social life, appointments, trips, and dalliances lived in a Note called SOCIAL LIFE. Some people were literally offended by this and begged me to get on Google Calendar, which I felt was extremely laborious and not ‘who I was as a person.’ I will say, I think I was more endearing when all of my future belonged within the confines of a single iPhone note, but we all make sacrifices in the name of personal growth.
Strava is a beautiful way for me to endlessly compare my running journey to my friends, boyfriend, and peers. It’s amazing when I think I ran fast or far and then someone else has absolutely left me in the dust, and their caption is ‘EZ recovery run while hungover and internally bleeding’ with selfies devoid of sweat. I do actually really love Strava, though. I love being able to know how fast or slow or far or un-far I ran on the Friday after my birthday last year, I love that I have personal records that I can beat or get whupped by depending on how good I feel that day. I have evidence that I ran this far, this fast, for this long. I have something tangible to be proud of.
I am learning how to cook, which means I am trying to figure out how to not be so afraid of hot oil in a pan, like when it spits at you and it burns and makes you want to cry because you’re like why is the oil personally targeting me? It also means navigating how to chop an onion in less than five to nine minutes, which is partly due to the fact the knife I use to chop is so dull you could try to stab yourself with it and it would bounce off your skin without breaking the epidermal layer. These things are terribly difficult to overcome, I’ve found. But with the NYT Cooking app (this is not sponcon BTW, as much as it may seem) I have several simple-enough recipes saved, and I can try a new one every couple of weeks or so, and I can try them again and get better at them one-by-one, and I can be a bad cook who still cooks. Whether or not I’d like to admit it, I’d rather do something I like and be bad at it, than not do it at all because I’m scared of some hot oil.
All of these things help me feel like a good person. A person who tries new things. A person who wants to do more. A person who can give you a good recommendation for Thai. A person who cares about themselves and wants to care about others, too.
Often, I can be in a mood where I’m like, what did I do last week, what did I do last night, nobody has texted me in two hours so that probably means everyone forgot I exist? Documenting things is so important to combat that thinking, as it offers a reminder that I exist (and thrive all by myself.
When I get dinner at a ‘Want to Go’ restaurant on my Google Maps and have a Southern Rhône Red, even if the food was mid and the wine was forgettable and I was in a weird mood the whole time, documenting means it happened and I had the experience and it was part of my life. I can look back and say wow, what a mediocre three hours of my life that was on November 11th, 2022, and I almost feel tears because it means I was alive then and I’m alive now and I can remember it and isn’t that so special?
I used to be so averse to documenting and journaling because I thought, why write down that I had coffee and read a book and looked out the window and picked my nose on July 1st, 2021? Why does it matter that I had a nice time in Red Hook on May 15th, 2019, or that I was in a fight with my friend on August 12th, 2020 that we resolved because we realized it was stupid? Who cares that I made turmeric pasta on January 12th, 2023 and it was creamy and deceptively easy and very fun to make? In many ways, NOBODY cares. And in many ways, THIS IS ALL THERE IS. You can find almost everything you want out of life in the everyday, in the routine, in the mundane. As boring as it sounds and as much as an inner part of me fights against believing.
Sometimes the thrill is when you’re own best friend, and the only reason you feel that way is because you’re humming your current favorite song and you’re making your bed for the first time in weeks and the sun is shining and you briefly forgot you had a phone. And it’d be a shame if I ever again felt like that wasn’t worth writing down.
luvvvvv :,)