In Time Only Time Will Speak For Time

Been reading some Hannah Hinchman for research—her wonderful book on illuminated journals, A Life In Hand—and came across this, from Geoff O’Gara’s introduction:

For a professional writer, journal-keeping is mercenary. I have tried at times to work through my problems by consulting myself in writing, and I’ve tried to regularize my life with a morning tea-cup of record-keeping, but it never works. My journal always resorts to cold-eyed thievery. It thrives inversely to the writing I do for public consumption. I turn to it during fallow periods, and it fills up like water rising in a canal lock; when a kind of equilibrium is reached, the gates open and I turn to an article or a short story; I pick through the journal, steal from is, and otherwise shun it.

Yeah. What he said. Just like that.