Nothing is sacred anymore, I guess.

After nearly a decade of doing this, I am confident – and slightly chagrined – to say that my diary continues to be my most popular work. Forget my complex architectural drawings or whimsical fantasy illustrations drawn for the purpose of evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder; it’s the autobiographical comic strips of yours truly bumbling her way through adolescence and adulthood with her dignity lying in dirty tatters around her that gets ya.

It is certainly the most enduring project, starting as short comics and doodles in the faint grids of my Muji calendar booklet in the first year of high school that quickly got the attention of my classmates and teachers. Mindful that I was in a school setting, of course, I kept my violent imagination and perversion to the minimum so that if the book was ever left behind in a classroom the story in it was not going to send me to the principal or the counsellor upon discovery. Partly to avoid this, I started drawing moments in my everyday life as it is objectively less happening and incriminating than the bizarre misadventures of my fictional sword-wielding, homicidal characters, and before I knew it, I’ve committed to journaling.

Despite the undeniable entertainment and joy it has brought to anyone who managed to get their big, fat noses in it since high school (just kidding, I love you all. Well, most of you), I feel like my journal has only become a polished, portfolio-worthy piece of work that can be shared even more publicly now. Before, it was a glorified sketchpad filled with bombastic comic strips punctuated with study notes and homework reminders, which the book was originally for, with some pages often falling apart – before it evolved into a glorified sketchpad filled with bombastic comic strips. Study notes were regulated somewhere else. The pages still fell out, though.

Soon, I was attending university; over those years, surrounded by fellow creatives with their own ways of documenting their lives or their enviable sketchbooks that look suspiciously curated (they were just that good!), I introduced various styles, methods and elements to my journaling, such as sticking tickets and memorabilia scrapbook-style or scanning the pages in to colour them digitally, the way I do with my main illustrations works. None of it worked out.

While they would never see the light of the public eye, I know that all of these failed experiments were integral to what my journal is today, the first one I will complete and let loose into the world one day – at the risk of embarrassing myself and pissing off the key characters of my life in the year 2022. I’m prepared.

Integral, too, were all the plainly drawn and unembellished journals of previous years that I never finished. Even worse, I always seemed to lose steam in the middle of November, of all months. That makes almost 7 years of books showing only 10 or 11 months out of a year, every year, which is just as good as wasting 11 months or 90% of every year for close to a decade (so is that like 90% of a decade?), in my opinion. As a result, I probably cannot tell you what happened every past December in my life other than losing the Christmas spirit a little more every time the holiday rolls around and drinking too much.

I also tried keep journals in the traditional sense – you know, the proper ones that start with “Dear Diary” and ends with progressively worse handwriting - but they were even less successful, lasting a few weeks to a couple of months before I got depressed over the repetitive banality of my thoughts and lack of accomplishments. I don’t know why I felt like I had to sound clever or impressive in something I never intended for anyone else to read even post-mortem, let alone experience epiphanies brought on by my razor-sharp observations of society and human existence, but I did. And with despair and resignation, I realised it was just simply not possible to have my life and writing style and still sound as eloquent or interesting as the fictional diaries or memoirs I was vainly and futilely trying to emulate. Doodling, therefore, was the more honest and appropriate expression. Not to mention a great way to develop freehand drawing skills and learn to draw fearlessly.

One of the most important lessons you can ever learn as an artist or writer is that perfecting a piece of work is not as important as finishing one. You will never be a true artist until you commit to seeing a project to completion, bonus points if it also happens to look great in the end. In fact, learning to execute the work from start to finish is what helps you improve on your skills and chart your progress more than if you worked in random spurts of inclination. In junior year of college, one of my professors shared a study illustrating this (I didn’t note down the name of the study or who conducted it, but if you happen to recognise it based on my description, PLEASE LET THIS FOOL KNOW): in a university, artists taking a course in ceramics were split into two groups. Group A was tasked to make one perfect object while Group B just had to make as many objects as possible. In the end, they found that Group B performed better than A despite not having the expectation of perfection put on them, because they had the freedom to explore and experiment for precisely that reason, applying and learning different methods to their creations in the time their counterparts were fussing over the little details on a single piece of work.

As for how long was the study’s duration, what the objects were, and how exactly success was measured here, I don’t know. This is a blog run by an idiot, not a reliable source of information you can cite in your term paper. But hopefully, my point still stands.

In other words, my obsession over perfection got in the way of completing any of my past journals. I experimented liberally and even enjoyed the process like the Group B ceramicists, but as soon as I realized that the book didn’t look the way I wanted it to look, I would feel discouraged, give up and move on to the next journal, which was often next year, telling myself it will finally be different, that this will be the book with exactly a year’s worth of stories to tell.

While I think that working on the previous journals paid off with respect to allowing me to learn what works and what doesn’t, it is sad that they didn’t get the love and attention they needed to become complete stories in their own right – one more month, equating to one or two more double-page spreads, was all that was needed. I might have had a comprehensive chronicle of my formative years by now – a body of work that is imperfect, yes, but finished, coherent, whole, much like a collection of photo albums accounting for every significant stage of your firstborn’s life.

There’s no use dwelling in past regrets, though. Besides, better late than never.

So what does my diary look like now?

Obviously, doing this for years, being older and more experienced, being able to articulate my thoughts, having better time management, working smarter, knowing what to avoid, etc contributed to finally nailing the way I journal today. But if I have to choose the biggest “Eureka!” moment, it would be changing the format of the diaries.

When it became clear that I will be doing this for a long time, I thought it would be wiser to do it on something more archival than the flimsy, semi-bleached pages of a Muji booklet. I will always be brand loyal to Muji for office stationary, but sorry, as a passionate doodler and abuser of black ink, I need something sturdier, something with tooth.

In 2022, I went to Art Friend and bought a black, hardcover A5 sketchbook with white, heavyweight BLANK pages and since then, never looked back. With no grid conveniently providing me comic strips to simply fill in with details of my day. Which was what I wanted. They might be helpful in the beginning when you’re an amateur artist who isn’t the best judge on scale and proportion, but after 4 years of art school, you will surpass the need for the illustrative equivalent of training wheels and find the guidelines restrictive as well as redundant.

Another thing I got rid of was DATES. See, in the Muji books, every year had a theme (2018 was dogs, 2019 currency and 2020 fantasy) stated in the first page, with the month and corresponding in-theme element on the margins heading every subsequent spread, reminiscent of an actual calendar. I genuinely had fun with this format, thinking what next month’s pooch or bank note would be – up until November, that is. Remember, that is when I always lose steam. And then the format is no longer this fun, clever monthly exercise, but yet another restriction, another form of forced consistency serving to contrast my own inconsistency, my failure. ‘I just don’t want to do this anymore! December is so tough!’ I will wail internally as I stare into the face of the stupid portrait I pre-emptively - arrogantly - drew in the next margin.

It’s not just December. There are plenty of opportunities for life to get too hectic and overwhelming, leaving me with no time to record what has been going on and no energy or inclination to get around to it when I do, because I know it won’t be enough before the next tsunami of events hits. Then before I know it, one month becomes two, two months becomes half a year, and I’m left staring at pages and pages of blank squares gaping up at me from March to August while my brain sputters with the effort to remember the highlights of last week, let alone the summer holidays.

So no, you will NEVER see any of my diaries in full before the year 2022. I get anxiety attacks just looking at the empty squares. Stop asking, please.

Compounded with simply improving my doodling skills, all my diaries from 2022 onwards are neat and aesthetically pleasing books full of simple and compact black-and-white drawings that people have told me looks like a printed graphic novel (until they see the white out) , bursting with action, humour and personality. They cannot resist picking it up and flipping through the pages to read everything closely, they say. I believe you, I reply, because I do it too, all the time, and I am the author; none of it should be new to me, but after 7 years of failure, it still kind of is. I’ve never been so consistently satisfied with a visual journal before. I have never made one so clean and professional-looking, yet while retaining the spontaneity and organic, free-flowing quality of my linework that have endeared this piece of work to my audience in the first place.

Shit, I still can’t stop kissing my ass over this. But you know the history now, so let me have this.

Ok, so where can I read your stupid diaries?

On Patreon! While I’m proud of my diary, it is still personal and filled with uh, really unsavoury moments, so it has to be put behind a paywall, though one I’ll keep as affordable as possible.

These are high-resolution and edited scans of 2023, so over 400 pages worth, with written commentary – and by right there should be more but right now I cannot locate my scans from Diary 2022 which really pisses me off because I don’t want to scan and edit all THAT again. So pray for a miracle to happen with my damaged hard drive, please.

Read my diary on Patreon

Hey everyone, you can read my diary now!

Comic: Baby frogs

How Far We’ve Come - Studio Showcase