Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere’s Fan”

Looking at the strangers around me in this foreign land, it is clear to me that you never know what someone is going through. The people closest to you might be keeping secrets. What if we lived in a world where we shared our entire lives?

When I was in high school, I began envisioning such a world. This blog is partially research for this idea, because I am working on a story where everyone reads each other’s journals: privacy is not a concept the protagonists know of. So I need to understand what it feels like to expose more of myself.

“To Be Alive, Part 1 / 生きていること、第一章” (19 March 2023)

I understand now.

1. People know about me a lot more than I know about them

Not only does this contribute to asymmetry in relationships, it is also unfair. I am already off to a bad start.  

This became grossly apparent while dating.

“Last month,” I said in September 2023, “I went to a ryokan without Wi-Fi and electricity –”

“To look for the love of your love,” my date interjected.

I furrowed my brows.

“I can’t figure out if you’re sarcastic or not,” I said. We’d never discussed my blog.

2. People almost never admit that they know about me a lot more than I know about them

I’m used to being unread. I post about my life on a monthly, weekly, sometimes even daily basis, as if to a void. Until someone mentions their visit to this void.

“You read all the bad things that happened to me,” I found myself saying to various people, “and never once thought to reach out?”

In the fifteen months that have passed since the inception of blog, fifteen people or so told me they’d read one of my posts. This almost always came incidentally, as a small, minor comment that took me by surprise.

Only three people broke this mould.

The first, who I dated in spring 2023, read every single post I’d ever written, twice, in one day. He showed me his favourite sections, and created a list of follow-up questions.

The second, who I dated in fall 2023, read more than he admitted. It came to a point where I wondered just how much he knew about me.

The third, who I befriended in spring 2024, saw me writing feverishly on my laptop, asked about my doings, and, upon hearing about my blog, immediately started reading it aloud to me. He read dozens of posts in one day. We grew very close very quickly.

I’ve lost touch with all of them. After fifteen months of tenacious, time-consuming, and futile blogging, it seems arrogant that I assumed my writing would reach more than fifteen people.

3. Stalkers

When I don’t know if someone reads my writing, it makes me feel invisible. When someone I don’t want to read my writing tells me that they did so, it makes me feels invaded.

Lately, someone had been stalking me. Well, more than one person. Now, one of them had found a new way to keep an eye on me, after I’d been trying to get them off my trail.

Problem was: this blog.

“Your digital footprint is too big,” a friend had remarked a few weeks ago, after suggesting I blocked someone.

My impetus for this blog was for anyone interested in reading it to be able to do so. The downside was: anyone willing to read it could do so.

“Trial by Fire / 火だるま” (25 November 2023)

A few relationships I ended while traveling carried on without my knowledge or consent, because those people kept reading about my doings.

When I write something, whether autobiographical non-fiction or fiction that wasn’t inspired by my life, I present my soul in the form of words. Sadly, I can’t control who can access it, and who cannot.

4. People don’t condemn the bad, but also don’t commend the good

They always focus on the less-than-favourable. It is rather bleak when someone has nothing nice to say about your biggest passion.

Then again, no one has ever confronted me about something I’ve written about them that wasn’t to their liking. They corrected inaccuracies or pointed out their presence in my stories, but never demanded that I deleted their trace. This came as a relief, after worrying that I had exploited their life for my prose. Thus, whenever I wrote about someone else, I used an alias, and omitted details that were too private.

Truth be told, I also omitted some of my thoughts about certain people, if these were too hurtful. There is a lot of ugliness and infatuation in my private journal that are necessary to understand my state of mind and motivation in various chapters. This self-censorship makes the public story hard to follow. I will undo it with the travel memoir that I intend to publish. The people who might take offense are no longer in my life, so they won’t read it.

Why didn’t anyone ask me to delete all mention of their faults and problems? I didn’t always paint a flattering portrait. But I suspect that people like to see themselves in a story.

Writing about someone is my way of betraying the impact they’ve made on my life. I wonder which people I mentioned the most? I will check the statistics once I come up with aliases for everyone.

5. Blogging about my dating life ruins my dating life

Case in point: in winter 2024, I dated someone I was insanely attracted to. He thrilled me even more with his interest in my blog. When I posted about other successful dates that happened concurrently, he showed an even greater interest in those. I tried to shift focus to him, but the damage was done. He disappeared.

I don’t think one should know if the person they’re dating is seeing other people. Only when things get serious is it time for that conversation. Otherwise, it is a recipe for jealousy and suspicion.

Blogging about my dating life in real time for anyone to read ruined my chances with at least one suitor. I am still in favour of sharing my private thoughts, rather than keeping secrets. But the other person needs to communicate just as openly for this to work.

I don’t think I will blog about my dating life in Tokyo. Living there for a year starting July will allow me, for the first time in my life, to date without being constantly on the move. Distance will cease to ruin my romantic and platonic connections. In the absence of this obstacle, will I be able to build something stable?

After experiencing the good and bad of love while traveling, I feel so ready for a relationship, that I will make it my mission. So I will try to keep my private life private, like a normal person.

I always sucked at being normal.

6. Blogging can enhance writing more than fiction

Inventing a story sometimes takes more time than actually writing it. Good fiction takes years to produce.

When I documented my doings on a daily basis, however, I already knew what to write. I focused less on the story, and more on the craft.

Writing is a muscle that needs to be pumped regularly in order to grow. I now know that non-fiction is a gym that trains you for fiction: literature’s hardest obstacle course.

7. Journalling can become an obsession

At the beginning of my trip, I documented very little, compared to how much I do now. Sometimes I even write down entire dialogues, because they are so momentous.

For example, I rejoice over my detailed record of Horizon’s birthday party in Busan, on 10 June 2023, and every nugget of wisdom she said to me when we both had tears in our eyes. Yet I lament not transcribing a heart-to-heart in Kyoto, on 9 April 2023, in an empty alley at 2 AM. This hours-long conversation with a new friend about my biggest hurdle in life made me replace sleep with crying.

At least I remember it in my head.

As an aspiring author and filmmaker, my free time before my trip always revolved around books and films. Now, I’ve given up on my hobbies, feeling compelled to write instead about my life.

8. Journalling immortalizes the forgettable

There are moments in my life so climatic, that I felt quite assuredly would never slip my mind. But the brain cannot readily store them all. We remember, but we don’t remember that we remember.

Like that that time I came out at 16 years old, and it didn’t go well. I forgot about it for almost a decade, perhaps owing to repression. Until it resurfaced one day. When I read what I wrote in my diary after this incident, I recalled it sharply.

The same goes for moments from my trip that are less than a year old. Documentation can cover for the human brain’s limitations, and allow me to relive them.

Even dating can benefit from it. Sometimes, when I am invited to a second date weeks after the first, I read what I wrote about the first to refresh my memory.

9. Journalling proves what has changed, and what hasn’t

Memory changes over time. Words don’t.

People tend to misremember the past and claim that certain new phenomena or behaviours are new; especially if they are worse. Journalling can corroborate or refute this.

In this regard, it is almost a weapon. Returning to Israel after fourteen months and seeing how no one around me has changed – let alone for the better – I contend with my family, who claims that the behavioural patterns I denounce are recent.

On the other hand, rereading old diary entries sometimes shocks me, because of how much I have changed.

10. Journalling shows how much I improve at living life

Before this blog, I never wrote about my routine. My life was simply too dull. Now, blogging motivates me to pursue more and more adventures. Even the mishaps I suffered – all those moments that wounded my body or crushed my soul – read more like a scene from a book than something that happened to me.

As a writer, this is exactly what I want out of life. Dangerous injuries while alone in nature; heartbreaks that make me cry myself to sleep. They gave me pain, depression, and life lessons, but most of all, they gave me a story.