Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I've been keeping a journal of my medications. It started with keeping track of when I was taking Ibuprofen to help with some shoulder pain I was having. Later on, it extended to me tracking my symptoms while on my new medications. I went from Zoloft to Prozac and a mood stabilizer called Olanzapine instead of an anxiety medication whose name I don't remember because I rarely took it (it was designated "as needed"). We tried some other medications before settling on the Olanzapine, and the journal was used to track my symptoms and potential side effects.
Originally, I used Evernote to create and update the journal. After some time, I became frustrated with how Evernote was performing. Frankly, there is no excuse in 2025 for updating a text file to have input lag. The file size wasn't even especially large by Evernote standards, yet updating it was a test of my patience. I could finish a sentence before the first word finished appearing. I wrote to Evernote about this and got absolutely no response. Between that and their price hike, I decided not to renew my subscription, only keeping it around as an archive. I moved the journal to Apple Notes on 01 SEP 24 SUN. I had some reservations about it because it didn't seem to have many of the same features as Evernote.
When it comes to Apple software, a phrase you may hear time and again is how something will be simple and easy, but rarely if ever obvious or discoverable. For example, in my journal, each entry is headed by the date, and the rest of it is a series of bullet points, each followed by a timestamp. With Evernote, making bullet points is fairly straightforward; the icon for it is right there in plain sight. With Notes, the option to format your text that way is not exactly obvious. I felt silly having to look up how to make them. At this point, it's second nature, and one could argue growing pains come with the territory for any piece of software, even a note taking app.
Note taking apps kind of baffle me the more I think about it. You'll find no shortage of debates online about what differentiates a note taking app like Evernote or Notion from a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The closest thing there really is to a consensus is that a word processor is interested in what your text will look like when printed out, be it on physical paper or something more convenient like a PDF or an ePub file. Note taking apps, by contrast, are designed to help you get your thoughts down as quickly and painlessly as possible, making itself as malleable as possible to your stream of consciousness. On top of this, note taking apps add a number of quality of life features to help you organize those thoughts once you've committed them to text.
This led me to something of a dilemma. There's an old saying that goes, "Never write down what you don't want spoken aloud in public." At the same time, a journal, by its very nature, is a record of your private thoughts, and there's nothing wrong with keeping it that way. Somewhere between these perspectives rests another quality of journals that nobody really likes to talk about, the fact that they have the capacity to survive you.
Barring chucking it in the fire before you snuff it as the late Virgil requested (and was ultimately ignored), your journal is the very definition of an open book once your time has passed. It's like any other book on a shelf, able to be opened and read at another person's leisure, no real permission required. At worst (maybe best?), you were the sort of meticulous person who encrypted their journals by writing in some indecipherable shorthand or even a simple substitution cipher. Maybe you were one of those legends who developed a full language and your book can join the likes of the Voynich Manuscript.
Of course, that's all assuming your journal is a physical book.
Basically, with a physical book, the part about it surviving you is baked in to the medium. A digital file, by contrast, is somewhat more obscure, especially in this era of increased concerns over privacy in the face of large scale data leaks.
One of the reasons I keep this journal, most entries of which are simply timestamps for when I took my Prozac and mood stabilizer, is for the sake of my doctors and counselor, so I could refer back to any date and time to aid recalling symptoms or changes in my behavior or whatever else may be relevant. In this regard, it's very helpful since I'm right there to scroll through it. However, what happens when I die? I don't expect anyone other than have the foresight to use my face or fingerprint to open the iPhone or iPad (respectively), much less know the PIN for when those means of entry fail. My Mac mini is old school, using a simple password for entry, and nobody knows that. These are all good things for security purposes, but leave much to be desired on the sharing front. The best I can hope for is to have enough time to blurt out a password or text a link to someone before my eyes close for the final time.
Maybe I could leave some kind of puzzle-like paper trail for someone to figure out if they felt like going on an adventure, an adventure to discover when and why I stopped drinking coffee. Spoiler alert, it didn't play nice with my medications.
