A person can treat their own character as something to be deliberately constructed through lists of resolutions, reading programs, and rules for conduct rather than discovered or accepted as fixed. The journal functions less as a record of a self than as an instrument for manufacturing one, where writing down an intention is itself a step in becoming the kind of person who holds it.
Formation can be pursued by compiling and working through exhaustive inventories: books to read, words to learn, films to see, music to hear. The sheer accumulation and cataloguing of culture is treated as the raw material from which a mind is built, prioritizing breadth of ingestion as a precondition for later original thought.
Sontag frames her attraction to women not primarily as a moral or social issue but as a test of whether she can admit what she wants to herself, treating self-deception as the central danger. Sexual experience becomes evidence used to measure the gap between who she claims to be and what her body actually pursues.