wffl

vaguely burnt

  • it/its

I do stuff; pfp by spicymochi



spiders
@spiders

USED TO BE back in the day if you were going insane, you would wrote down your crazed ramblings in a journal. so that when you died, the protagonist could find it and see your descent into madness and they called it "environmental storytelling". people would praise it. good writing, they said.

but NOW, in the digital era, it seems hardily NOBODY'S keepin madness-journals anymore. you just post your despaired rants on your social media and it's called "venting" and everyone blocks you for it. and THEN the website shuts down and all the posts are gone, and how's the protagonist gonna read about your downfall then huh?

and let me tell you, you can't even write in erratic directions on a tweet. can't draw eyes in the margins. can't scribble neither. nothing beats good old paper in pen, nope! but folks just don't appreciate a descent into madness anymore...


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @spiders's post:

im down for it but the idea of someone else reading it is, I can't imagine anything more humiliating. And if I have to make my journal writing seem more respectable, is it a journal at all?

this is what the vent post is. it is what might have been a deeply personal journal entry as raw and unfiltered as you want, made Respectable and Public. the mental health crisis put on display for our friends. for us to vent on social media is to allow other people to read our own madness-journal and simultaneously dictate the contents of it, and it's thus a behavior we are trying to unlearn. by keeping a physical journal. the part about the protagonist of the story coming along and reading it is more just a weird surreal joke on our part.

sure, that's what the vent post is, it's sanitized. Now if I write down something raw and as close to my truth as possible, and someone I live with finds it, that's worse.

I suppose I can journal in the notes on my phone but I yearn for the physical, which exposes it to physical security risks.

you actually don’t need to die in order to part with your madness journal. you could just, say, shove it in the closest mailbox out of bone-deep conviction that you must shed all your earthly belongings in order to transcend or wtvr

*totally random made-up example, def not speaking from experience