Tone

Well, ironically enough, after leaving my diary-x blog for over a year, I started adding to my huge journal again and noticed they had a ‘download journal’ option. Being the paranoid person I am, I immediatley took a backup.

Two months later Diary-X is no more. The hard drive died, the automatic journal hard drive backups were never working in the first place, and I have been clicking on diary-x user’s new journals trying to find a blog site my work proxy doesn’t ban.

Everyone’s entries are understandably bewildered and grieving. Over the course of a few years (yes, Blogs have been around before 2004 dammit) you can spend literally weeks writing and uploading other writing to your journal. The virgin-blog entries read like cyclone survivors: ‘I just can’t comprehend….all the photos and writing from my life in the last few years are just gone!’

Frankly I’m surprised more people didn’t make a copy of their journal. Out of paranoia I labouriously clicked through every one of the hundreds of pages of my journal, printed them off and saved a file, a few years ago (before the backup feature). Because I used the backup feature when it was introduced, I myself have only lost this year’s entries. All my new, happy entries, but replaceable all the same.

If I had lost everything and had no copies, I think I would have had to go home from work, such would be the grief I was stricken with. (I’m on a fantasy reading binge at the moment. Does it show?)

So my sincere wishes to those bereaved diary-xers.

However another thread creeping through the entries is ‘I must treat this as a new beginning.’ People are taking advantage of the purge to wash themselves free of past gripes, mistakes, grudges etc. I know this is merely a way to stem the grief from losing everything, but I was thinking this same thing when I started journalling again this year.

I had such a lot of angsty, hasty writing which I was loathe to edit (except when faced with legal problems) as it really did illustrate my feelings at the time. Although this made the journal unbalanced in the anguish department, it was my vent. When I started writing again I didn’t feel right tacking on my new entries to this monster of a saga, especially because most of the people who made it a saga are now far away in space and time, from me. After meeting my fiance Arieh and then finishing Uni, my life has hit a turning point in which the little crap that does occur is my own fault, and therefore I have an enormous feeling of happiness, contentment and security which I never really had before.

But I didn’t want to start a new journal, abandoning that which I knew was my past and myself. It wasn’t a censoring thing, there was nothing I was ashamed of, I just didn’t want my now-happy entries to appear incogrous to my past entries.

Now that decision has been made for me by Diary-X. And while I start a new journal here, I am safe in the knowledge that I can always cut and paste all those old entries from my diary-x backup. (The backup format is in some incomprehensible crap format which is really only useful for ripping out what I know to be the text in notepad. If anyone knows if there’s a reader I would be appreciative) And while I will almost definitley re-post my published stuff, articles, essays etc I think I will have a bit of a break, a bit of breathing room, first.

So until you notice entries behind this one, know that I am enjoying my sabbatical from my past.