Why We Should All Be Keeping Coronavirus Journals

Keeping a journal in these uncertain times may prove to be so important. The world has been turned upside down, sometimes only the bad drop out. Keeping a diary will help us remember the good and bad times along with the gratitude we have towards each other.

While social media is fighting about the who, what, where and how. It seems our feelings can get in the way of what's rational. We suppress our feelings just to shelter each others feelings. Those feelings have to go somewhere, chronicling our feelings may help us through these times. A journal it can be factual, original and soul searching at the same time.

These are interesting times the medical field will spend the next decades studying this coronavirus and COVID-19. Epidemiologists, doctors, researchers and even hospital administrators are already busily studying how this pandemic has happened, what it is doing to our bodies and how to respond.  But historians, while busy now putting current events into historical context, will not begin actively studying our times for another 30 years or so. And they will need our help.

Wolf leather blank book w/ latch

While most of our Facebook debates will likely be lost to time, at least some of our tweets will be saved by the Library of Congress for posterity. But these public sources will be just snippets of our present. Historians will need other sources to be able to understand, and learn from, our times. They will need more to ensure that the stories that are so often lost to the past are told. Oral histories and personal journals will be vital tools to take their understanding beyond the headlines.

One of the most famous talked about diary's  is The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank,  the diary was written while she was in hiding for two years with her family she wrote about her feelings and frustration of her situation.  One passage in her diary, reads: "I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously". 

Her last know extract:

Anne Frank

Dearest Kitty,

"A bundle of contradictions" was the end of my previous letter and is the beginning of this one. Can you please tell me exactly what "a bundle of contradictions" is? What does "contradiction" mean? Like so many words, it can be interpreted in two ways: a contradiction imposed from without and one imposed from within.

The former means not accepting other people's opinions, always knowing best, having the last word; in short, all those unpleasant traits for which I'm known. The latter, for which I'm not known, is my own secret.

So it seems that Journaling our personal thoughts, our highs and lows can be very therapeutic and historically important.

Mystic Aura journal

sources
Anne frank House
nytimes
Wikipedia