Talking to Myself: Diary as a Record of Life Process

After receiving a red leather diary for my ninth birthday, I practiced writing daily for the following year. I abandoned my diary activity at age ten and did not return to it until recently when I traveled during my sabbatical leave. In this paper I present some parts of my travel diary in order to learn more about how the process of living can be recorded. Allport (1942) notes that understanding the “particulars of life ” can be the beginning of psychological knowledge development. Allport’s observation could be considered a call for modern diary methods. After all, diary methods document and explore the particulars of life as self-report instruments examining experiences. Diaries as such provide opportunities to investigate everyday social, psychological and physiological situations. In this way diaries are designed to capture the “little experiences of everyday life that fill most of our working time and occupy the vast majority of our conscious attention ” (Wheeler & Reis, 1991, p. 340). A diarist is in conversation with herself. Conversation itself is a reflection of the intertwining of the social with cultural processes. Sociocultural theorists emphasize that this intertwining is a primary activity of knowledge co-construction and appropriation (Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 1997). At first glance an inner conversation may appear to be an artificial extension of an act that normally transpires between two or more people (Aleven & Ashley, 1997). However, older theories of dialogue with the self (Mead, 1934) have shown that the critical features o