Map of Lost Hours

All of my favorite characters were journalists. As a teen, I was a sickly specimen of humanity. I spent many hours abed, reading, instead of out playing. I was a voracious reader, and among my favorites were DragonLance, The Chronicles of Amber, and Star Trek novels. In all of these books, the characters journaled.

I loved Raistlin Majere, identified with him even. Here was a sickly child who grew to power and fame, and as a feverish 13 year old, that was a fantasy I could get behind. But there wasn’t mystery in Raistlin. He was obvious in his goals even if he could be circuitous in his plots. The mystery of Krynn came in the form of Astinus of Palanthus. This calm man who ran the largest library in the known world, spending his days writing the histories of people large and small, without judgement. He journaled for history.

Then there was Corwin and his son Merlin. Ten books from the Chronicles of Amber written in first person. They were the first-hand accounts of fantastic adventures that reshaped reality. Each man revealed himself flawed and human despite their grand powers, and each one left me with the sense that as much as they did include some of their failures, each was likely inflating their successes too. In the shadows of Amber, these men are manipulators by the magic they wield, and no doubt unreliable narrators because of it. But they journaled at least some version of their lives.

Then there were the Star Trek captains. I dreamed, yearned, to be on a space ship in deep exploration. I had plans to become an aerospace engineer so I could help design those first vessels for humanity to go across the stars. And in each of those Star Trek novels, or the series when I got to watch them, the captains journaled. Captain’s Log, Star Date…

I bought my first journal when I was fourteen. I remember it had two different covers, so that you could write your daydreams in one direction and nightmares in the other. The colors were vibrant, with this gold or silver foil imprint that shined in the light. And the pages were gold-lined and ended their life mostly empty. The same fate awaited my next journal, one with a sepia-toned mercator-projection map on both covers.

Throughout my life, off and on, I’ve been lured by the siren song of an interesting looking journal sitting on the shelf of a hobby store and thought it was time to begin journaling again. Or maybe it was a desperate attempt at organizing my life, and three days of binging YouTube videos on bullet journaling, or comparing OneNote to Obsidian to…

But it wasn’t until 2024 that I really took journaling seriously. Journaling became a way not explore myself, to piece together fragments of memories, to track my health problems, and to combat the omnipresent negative thoughts that my constant companion, C-PTSD, whispered in my ear. At first I wrote down all of my negative thoughts and then forced myself to rebut them in ink.

Then I shifted. I began to approach my journaling as writing with perspective.

I was never particularly close to my daughter, and my wife is a generation younger than myself. The odds favor both of them outliving me. What if they want to get to know me, to remember me, to hold on to a piece of me? What if some future historians or anthropologists want to know about life in our era? So I began to write from this perspective. I wrote about what I did, thoughts I had for stories or theories for research. I wrote about my opinions of current affairs, about how I’d improve the world if I had the power. What I didn’t write about were things that I decided were inconsequential to this purpose. If my wife is remembering me because she misses me, she doesn’t need to know that I was angry at her for an hour because she was late to dinner. That’s unimportant to the larger memory. And I told myself if it was unimportant to her, or to the future historians, it shouldn’t be important to me. This forced me to focus on the positives in life. Or, at least the neutrals.

On top of that, I created weekly To Do lists. I had started going back to college by then and I would sit down every Monday morning and write all the work I needed to do for my classes that week, any appointments I had, anything that took more than 15 minutes that I knew I had to do that week. I’d give myself an extra page and I’d write down anything I didn’t plan to do but came up through the week. At the end of the week, I’d sit down and write a review about what I accomplished or didn’t and why. This really helped me stay on top of my tasks, but more importantly taught me to see that I wasn’t as idle or lazy as I told myself I was in my head.

I’m proud of the stack of books… the three books I’ve now filled … the two and a quarter books and 6 months of digital journaling that I’ve done so far. It’s a practice that’s helped steady me through some tumultuous times and helped me figure out some of who I am.

Which brings us to the Map of Lost Hours. I am not Astinus, a passive observer of history. While I am as likely to be as unreliable a narrator as Corwin, I’m not writing because I did something consequential that people need to know about. And I’m not in Starfleet, writing a sterilized report for a galactic organization.

I am a man with the dissociative amnesia that comes with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A man who’s rebuilding his identity and his sense of self and self-worth. A man who’s trying to follow his therapist’s advice to do daily gratitude journaling, and Ross Gay’s idea of daily gratitude mini-essays. A man that wants to be more intentional with his thoughts, who wants to practice who he wants to be until he is that person. A man who wants his loved ones to have a way to remember him when he’s gone. A man who knows he lives in historic times and that the stories of the little people get lost among the celebrities.

But your status as a celebrity does not determine your life. The lives of everyone are worth remembering, worth reliving, worth connecting to. In this way, you could say that the Map of Lost Hours is a piece of art, a way to remind us of the beauty found in banality against the backdrop of explosive history.

More than that, the Map of Lost Hours is what it says on the tin. It’s a map to me - who I was in the past, and who I will be in the future, and where I am in the present. It’s a map I make as I go along, discovering what trauma has hidden from me, remembering what makes me smile, reliving the bitter and the joyous and all the moments in between. It’s a map of me discovering me.

All my favorite characters were journalists. When I think about the kind of journalist I want to be, I think of Dr. Ruth Behar. Dr. Behar was an anthropologist who practiced ethnographic research - research where the researcher lives among the studied population and observes them as a participant-observer. Dr. Behar asked why ethnographers were supposed to keep themselves separate. She argued that we should follow our passions and document where our lives intersected with our subjects. Quantitive research generates numbers - it fills spreadsheets and databases - and this is what we need to form our theories and our applications. But it’s qualitative research that lets us connect our work to stories. Ethnography allows us to take theory and wrap it into he emotions that make other people care about things.

The Map of Lost Hours, then, is also my homage to Dr. Behar’s concept of the Vulnerable Observer. My C-PTSD is an armor that keeps people at bay. It stops me from connecting to my fellow humans by not opening up to them. So this final thing the map is, is my vulnerability. Me, learning to lay myself bear, with a twist of artistic expression but keeping the core truth available. Me, tackling my fears of public speaking, of opening up, of being vulnerable.

These thoughts, this map, can be found on YouTube.